Is it just ME?

Or is the tyranny of the blow-dry the bane of every woman’s life?

FEW people would call me a high maintenance woman. I can go months without a leg wax and most days I wear sturdy men’s boots that do not require pedicured toes.

But there is one area of life in which I am a total princess.

I simply must have a blowdry. If I want to really stress myself out, I add up my annual blow-dry costs. A minimum £30 a pop — plus tips — once a week, come in at around £1,800 a year, and that’s before cut and increasingly regular need for colour. When I was young I thought blow-dries were for Miss Universe and old ladies having their tight grey curls shampooed and set. By early middle age, I realised they were frankly essential, the only way to look ‘put together’ and ‘groomed’. I’m not like those powerful executive sorts who have one every day at 6am, but I do need my weekly fix — twice a week if I could.

You’d think by 50 I might have learned to dry my own hair, but I just can’t do it.

I’ve tried but it just gets tangled round the brush while birds eye my barnet thinking, ‘Mmn, nice pad.’

Why didn’t my mother tell me about this midlife hair wrangling nightmare?

She is a good mum, mostly, but she never told me about the two greatest challenges facing a woman in her 50s — the menopause and the drying of one’s hair.

I can cope with the rollercoaster of retreating hormones, but the trials of arranging hairs on my head utterly defeat me.

In the true spirit of campaigning feminism, every young girl should be taught how to do their own hair. This blow-dry tyranny must end.

You’d have thought by 50 I’d have learned how to dry my own hair!