I’ve been overloading accessories to deal with the root of a Covid issue

Icannot fit anything else on my head. I have taken to wearing scarves in my hair to cover what used to be grey roots and is now a whole forest of sad greyness plonked on top of some lovely brown tresses, like a small comedy wig. I was using a root spray for a while, but the area that needs to be covered is now so vast that I could be all day spraying it. And the sprays are never quite the right shade and they make my hair feel tacky and even dirtier than it is since I started washing it only once a week. The solution has been a modest collection of floaty scarves that I fashion into everwidening hairbands to cover my shame. People tell me I look quite boho, but they are lying. I look like what I am: a grey haired woman in a pandemic of denial.

Anyway, they’re quite bulky, the scarves, as most of them go around my head twice before being tied at the back, under my hair line. After I’ve worn one for a couple of hours, my ears get a bit sore. This is compounded by my increasing reliance on my reading glasses — another gift from the Getting Old Fairy — and when I have to add a mask to my ensemble, I have three different things going behind ears that were only designed for one, tops. On the one day a week I was obliged to work in the Operation Transformation office, I also had to wear heavy headphones. Between the mask, the scarf, the glasses and the headphones, I looked like a World War Two pilot off on a skirmish.

One day, I added earrings to the ensemble — I literally have no idea what I was thinking of, though I may have been trying to milk the whole boho thing — and my head kept leaning forward, until my jaw was almost on my desk.

A secondary problem with my floaty scarves is that they are quite prone to falling off. I went into Woodies wearing a blue scarf around my head the other day and left again without it — a rare example of a trip to the home improvement store leading to an actual disimprovement. I could have gone back in to try to find it, but with its ulterior motive now clearly visible to the

Woodies’ clientele, it felt a little like the time when I was pregnant and my knickers fell down in Tesco’s. Sometimes, you just need to step out of things and walk away.

On my previous occasion of grey shame, also known as the First Lockdown, I borrowed one of The Boy’s baseball caps. But there is something about people over 40 wearing baseball caps — especially women, sadly — which makes them appear insane. And I did experiment with woolly bobble hats for a while, but it’s a bit late in the season now for winter woolies and on work Zoom calls, bobble hats make you look as if you’ve won some class of a competition.

Still, I managed to wait out the first grey wave until the hairdressers re-opened and I’d love to be able to surf this one all the way to level three as well. I know lots of you have succumbed to the dreaded box colour by now, but whenever I’ve dyed my own hair — no matter what colour it said on the box — it has ended up a peculiar shade of plum that suits only over-ripe fruit.

The exception to my home colour woes was when I was a Class A cool rock chick and I dyed my hair jet black. The trouble with that period was that I also dyed my parents’ bathroom and most of their towels the same colour, and I think they were as relieved as I was when my income finally matched my ambitions and I handed my hair colour maintenance to the professionals. Since then, my hair has been many colours but most of them have been shades people might plausibly be born with and none has been utterly mad.

For all that, I have bought a box colour. I suppose I’m secretly afraid that the hairdressers will never re-open and that all the home dyes will be sold out. And the grey will eventually creep out from the edges of the scarves and short of wearing a tricolour or a table-cloth on my head, my shame will be visible to all. But I’m hoping that by the time that happens, the hairdressers will have re-opened and the whole world will be a little less grey. Come the glorious day. Come the glorious day.