Many people are precious about their hair. I am not one of these people.

When I was 17, I shaved the right side of my head, which was fashionable at the time, and pretty mild compared to other 90s hairstyles. It was cute, and easy to conceal by draping the rest of my hair over it. I was playing in a pit orchestra at the time; I chose the right side so it would face the stage rather than the audience. I really liked it. But my mother was furious when she found out. She treated me harshly because of it, a nasty episode that baffles and needles me to this day. I was nearly 18 and about to graduate and leave home. And it was only hair. (I have shaved my head completely many times since then, and I admit that every time that I do, a part of me thinks “Fuck you, Mom”.)

After the credit crunch hit, I shaved my head once a year for about six years. The cost of women’s haircuts are extortionate, and I wasn’t exactly flush. Picking up a packet of Superdrug disposable razors saved a lot of money. Plus I had the pleasure of shaving my head and watching it grow back. I had a new hairstyle every week, effortlessly. My partner Geoboy was particularly fond of the “suedehead” stage. My hair was blue when we first met.

My hair, despite its thickness, grows outwards to a ridiculous length before succumbing to gravity, leaving me looking like a dandelion clock for several weeks. My father called me “puffball” when I was a young child, while my mother gave me terrible bowl cuts at home. There are photographs of me wearing a fringe that describes a bizarre sloping arch. She has an unusual relationship to the horizontal. When I was a little older, she would take my little sister and me to get haircuts at a beauty school. Later we went to a salon in a strip mall where a nice woman named Heather took her scissors to us. “Layer it,” my mother would say. I doubt she knew what that meant. It just sounded good.

In time, Geoboy and I moved to York, our finances improved, and I realised I had reached the point in my life where it was time to commit to a hairdresser. And so I met George.

George took me in at a busy salon a short walk from my flat. She is a petite, elfin woman from Tadcaster. Although she was only in her early twenties when we met, she was confident and skilled.

It had been several years since I had had any professional attention given to my hair, and my first time there I felt like I was in a spaceship or some long-forgotten student film by George Lucas, all white surfaces and staff in black, heat machines dangling from the walls like giant mechanical spiders. When I tilted my head back towards the wash basin, I gazed up at shifting colours over bright pinprick lights like stars on the ceiling.

I only go 3 or 4 times a year, but George always remembers me. I am an introvert, and not naturally chatty, but some people (and/or alcohol) make it easy. I have a lot of hair these days so we’ve had time to speak of many things over the years: food, Harry Potter, perfume… One visit, after I had mentioned my Peace Corps service in Senegal, she asked, “So, do you speak African?”

George left in January to embark upon a months-long adventure in Central and South America with her boyfriend. After all, if not now, when? I used to do that sort of thing, and increasingly think I need to return to that lifestyle.

I have heard tell of female cancer patients who are devestated at the thought of losing their hair to chemotherapy, even temporarily. I would rather lose my breasts than my hair, said one. This sentiment shocks me. It is, after all, only hair.