When our elderly neighbour had a fall and ended up in hospital for her 90th birthday, it was our local hairdresser who called in to style her hair so it would look just right for her photos.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on the bonnet of a Silver Cross pram, my baby brother asleep inside, while Mam pushed us to the local hairdresser to touch up her perm.
Early photos betraying my mother’s handiwork as I gap-tooth grin in tones of sepia, hair lopsided and elfin short (less Mia Farrow’s Rosemary’s Baby, more Jim Carrey’s Dumb and Dumber).
The independent hairdresser became as essential to these neighbourhoods as the local shop, the parish church or the post office and, by the mid-1970s, you’d be hard pushed to find a suburb without one.
Time and again I would return, spending hours under a heated hood, rollers pinned, curls for my confirmation, forever chasing ringlets – only to prove everyone right as they fell to their natural poker-straight form within two hours.
