Use your head: There’s no grey area if it’s always ‘very nice’

Lucy Penman

It has been hard to ignore the growing hair-raising frenzy relating to hair in the news recently. From the royal princes to the US President, debate has been raging about whether to disguise hair loss (with elaborate, bouffant comb-overs), shell out for transplants or just stop pretending and embrace the razor cut.

This is an issue close to the hearts and heads of Mr P and myself. I’m sure Mr P will not mind my disclosing that he has not been blessed with lustrous locks and the passing years have seen him going for an ever-closer shaved style.

Mr P has gone further, though, deciding it is madness to be spending a princely £12 (yes, £12) a month at the barber’s and investing in a DIY hair cutting kit. Every few days, he’ll walk into a room, stand in front of me looking exactly the same as always and say: “Well?”

I have learned through bitter experience that the correct response is always “very nice”. I have learned this because this is the tactic he now employs when I come back from the hairdresser, reeling at the amount I have had to shell out on a colour and cut.

As I started going very grey in my early twenties, this is not a recent thing. Apart from the odd experiment where I’ve thought I’d go natural as I would end up looking like Helen Mirren and then realising I looked like Helen Mirren’s grandmother, it has been an ongoing drain on my bank balance.

I recently had a fairly drastic cut and walked into the house, where the usual scenario was played out. I say: “Well? What do you think?” Mr P does that desperate, caughtin-the-headlights calculation – is she wearing something new? Has the room been painted a different colour? Has she had her hair cut/ neck tattooed/nose pierced? – and settles on the all-bases-covered “very nice” while trying not to look anywhere in particular.

Well, it works for us.