CURLY TOPS - BAD HAIR DAY? BAD HAIR FULL STOP.

If there is one thing you will have noticed from our picture is that Clare and I both have curly hair. Yes, it is natural and yes, we still get asked that. No one perms their hair these days, do they? And no one chooses to have curly hair. You either learn to embrace it or spend your whole life at war with it - your arsenal: tongs, irons and countless products; your enemies: brushes, wind, blow dryers and washing the pig curls away and saying hello to static bush form that grows in volume at an exponential rate - big, Big, BIGGER! I've never had anyone come up to me and say, "I'd love to have hair like you!" - Except grandmothers. Curly hair isn't easy to manage and it can be tiresome especially when it's behaving badly and feeling the weather - like rheumatism. The reoccurring question of “is that natural”? is really one of morbid curiosity because you know what they’re actually thinking, is, how on earth did you get it to do that!

I have had a love/hate relationship with my hair since as long as I can remember. In fact, more hate than love. My mother who I love dearly, didn't have a clue what to do with it (my dad is the only one with curly hair well the little he had left). All my childhood pictures is with me with a brushed out fuzzball. My  teenage years weren't much better but became more bearable when I discovered VO5 soft wax. I do believe if I had got my hands on a pair of straighteners I would be ironed out fully and never gone back. But those early days I had to endure the teasing, the days when my mop resembled a birds nest or a matted group of dried out worms - electrocuted and dead. By the time I had discovered straighteners I had already begun to accept, me - just the way I am!

There's a brush coming our way Nina - The Horror!

Clare said she tried straightening her hair once. It took three hours then she walked out of the hairdressers and it was raining  and quicker than Usain Bolt her hair was puffa-fished back out. "You also cannot and should not try and vacuum pack natures frizz bomb, it only gets bigger with more voracity than before. Hats and grease were my only friends before products!" Clare adds. "I shaved it off once too - pure lunacy. The grow back phase - arghhhhh! As if teenage years aren’t agonising enough. Oh my did I have trouble, forget the pictures. If Playdough had made the Barbers shop in human head size, I would have gladly moulded my hair on every morning!"

When you have hair, which is so totally independent and arrogant to your wishes, a force of nature, there really is nothing else for it but to  just let it be. Leave it alone and one day it might come back and behave. Rebellious teenagers haven’t got anything on curly hair. But equally there’s a plus side Clare worked out the elasticity in a Maths exam and got marked for it! "Weird, just sitting there to the amusement of the a judicator measuring my hair’s spring back and doing %’s plus averages, of course! Girl Maths!"

Clare's got more:

1. The electric bill is less too. NO HAIRDRYERS NO HEATED APPARATUS ON NUCLEAR HEAT

2. You can go to any hairdressers or even do it yourself. A bodge job is hard to spot with medusa’s curls winding themselves around each other. Up a bit at on side, crooked, oh yeah I’ve got curly hair it looks like that anyway!

3. Time saving, no styling apart from a splodge of stuff everyday." 

4. No pawing over hair magazines - No point your hair is your style master, it takes orders from no one. No matter how sparkly the matador (stylist) with the big brush and diffuser claims to be.

Basically saving a small fortune, so you can have Bumble & Bumble! 

I have had times when I felt that my life would be easier if I had straight hair that somehow I would be taken more seriously but I've found peace with my hair and I really wouldn't' want to change it besides which, no one recognises me with straight hair. Once my husband walked straight into a room and then back out again because he didn't recognise me with straight locks. I've also found the right products for me, Moroccanoil curl cream and John Frieda's frizz ease while Clare prefers Bumble & Bumble EVERYTHING, she gets palpitations if she doesn’t have a good stock as security.

It dawned on me the other day that all our protagonist in our books have straight locks. None of them are curly. So perhaps, I still hold a pedestal for straight hair but even straight hair has its bad days. We took revenge and gave Eve a bad haircut after letting her mother's hairdresser loose on her hair, she cut it like farmers harvest wheat - quickly and to the ground!

"And before you've had the chance to look, massive chunks lay miserably on the floor, severed, limp and banished forever from your clown of glory and it's too late to change your mind as half your head is sheared beyond saving! Adam said I looked like a child from Village of the Damned. On the other hand, Adam sports a ginger military buzz-cut, so neither of us graces the realms of Vidal Sassoon's award winning style of the century; even sheep tend to have better cuts." (Extract from, My DisOrganised Life)