For the first few years of my life, my siblings and I were subjected to appalling hair cuts. I’ll put it simply: we rocked the ‘bowl cut’, so much so in fact, that my older brother and I earned the nicknames ‘Bobby Bowler’ and ‘Baby Bowler’ respectively. Good times. Our dear parents hired a family friend to cut our hair at home and she was lovely however, her one sticking point was that she wasn’t particularly good at hairdressing and my parents didn’t have the heart to seek alternative services in hairography for their ever-growing brood. Blast them!

As we got older, bowl cuts simply would not do and we berated our parents into allowing us to attend a proper hairdressers – a hairdressers I should note, that my mother had been frequenting for years. No bowl cuts for mummy, no sir. So off we went to the local hairdressers to find a hairstyle that was a little less, well, horrifying, and we were wowed by the sensory overload that was to be found there: the sound of hairdryers and chatter, and many a strange smell (I now know that one of these smells was the gloriously eggy and cat wee-redolent perming solution). It was brilliant.