It's been a traumatic week.  A week of me making something that is usually short and normally quite mundane, into a drama the height of Amy Winehouse's beehive.  I should really kick myself, it's not as if I live in the Congo or I'm trapped down a Chilean mine, for goodness' sake.  A little perspective is needed, but instead I am now bringing my drama here.  This is largely because everyone who knows and loves me is frankly more than a little bored. My hair drama (yes, hair!) has become all consuming.  Let me explain.

I've dreamt of having red hair for years.  Not auburn or chestnut or plum.  No, no, no I dream of a proper false red, think Linda-Evangelista-red from the early nineties, or Florence-and-the-Machine-red, or even the pale-one-from-Girl's-Aloud-red.  More specifically I dream of Lucy-Forster-red.  This cultural reference will mean nothing to you, it also means nothing to hairdressers and it has become apparent that it is a colour that I can't define or articulate. Lucy Forster was a sixth-former when I started boarding school.  She had vibrant red hair, wore short skirts, tartan tights and Jesus and the Mary Chain t-shirts (it was the 80s).  Her boyfriend, a cross between Robert Smith and Ian Curtis, completed the look.  To me, at 11, she was the epitome of cool and my hero-worship wasn't even diminished by her sixth-form habit of throwing winklepickers at me when I was on Pink Dorm bell duty (a story for another time).  I want hair like that.  I covet it revoltingly.  Simple job for the hairdressers then, taking over 20 years of cloudy memories and matching them with a colour chart.

So off I went to the hairdressers.  That was traumatic enough, given I rank hairdressers with dentists on the scariness scale, but that was only Day 1 of  what has become the Hunt for Red October.  It's now Day 9 and I have been various different redheads. Fraggle-red. Highland-cattle-red. Proverbial pillarbox-red. At its worst I was a combination of all of them at once. I have been described by friends and family, as coppery, chestnutty, like the inside of a Hummingbird Bakery Velvet fairycake and no doubt as various different terms for neurotic. I am currently, what I can only describe as, a cheap-bridesmaid-dress-burgandy.  A colour I particularly hate, can never understand people choosing at weddings and which I definitely don't want surrounding my head like a 1970s swimming cap.

I spend my evenings rushing from mirror to mirror examining my hair in different lights, tutting and clucking, crying and preening.  At times it's looked its best in the bathroom, at other times it's just looked its best covered in a hat with my head under the duvet. I have been to the hairdressers a total of four times (three separate hairdressers) and have dyed it myself at home (disaster resulting in Fraggle-red).  My head has been pulled, pushed, bleached and tutted over. Despite the fact that I can't talk about anything else, I can't seem to describe the colour to anyone without becoming a blithering, inarticulate buffoon, which by the way is a shade of red I haven't yet been. I have spent the GDP of a small country, my house looks like a scene from Psycho (red towels, red pillows, red shower) and I AM STILL NOT LUCY-FORSTER-RED. 

Worse still my six year old has told me today that red hair is "showy", I think she means obvious and attention seeking.  I'm afraid she's right, it is clear that my redheaded self is a neurotic, self-absorbed, inarticulate, hair bore. 
I've got the Mean Reds and I desperately need a Holly Go-lightly Tiffany destination to save my sanity and soothe my distressed scalp.  I fear the Hunt for Red October is yet to be over and that by the end of the month me and my redhair will be living in a cardboard box without any friends.  My long-suffering husband says it's all in my head. On my head more like.