A letter from a reader

At 67, I had spent forty winters choosing between warm ears and the hair I had just paid for

The only thing I write down from one week to the next is my own Friday appointment on the little card at the hairdresser’s, because Janine says she cannot read her own sevens and it is safer if I do it. I am not a writer, and it has never been my place to tell another woman what she ought to put on her head.

But three different women asked me about my hood at Tatton Park on Sunday, and I have now explained it so many times that it seemed easier to write it down properly.

I have had my hair done every Friday morning since about 1985. It is not vanity, or not only vanity. It is forty minutes in a warm chair with a cup of tea and somebody else’s hands in my hair, and I come out feeling like a person who has things in order. I will not be talked out of it.

The trouble is what happens next. From about the end of October, it is cold in Cheshire, and it blows. And from about the end of October, every woman who has her hair done has the same small decision to make at the front door.

You can be warm, or you can have hair. Pick one and stop asking me.

That was my sister June, about twenty years ago, on the steps of a church in a gale, and neither of us has improved on it since.

Nobody decides to spend forty winters with cold ears. It happens one Friday at a time, until you are a grown woman walking the dog with your shoulders up round your neck, telling your husband you are not cold.

How it happens

When I was a girl we had headscarves, and a good one would see you through most things. Then at some point the headscarf started to look like a costume, and we were all left to manage as best we could.

Go and look at what there is now. On one side, hats. Woolly ones with a grip on them that you pull down over your ears, and for as long as you have it on you are warm, and the moment you take it off in the café you look like you have been asleep on a bus. On the other side, the see-through plastic rain hood that folds up into a little pouch, which I am sorry to say I still have one of in my handbag, and which keeps nothing warm and fools nobody.

And then there is the scarf, which is a separate item, and which you have to remember, and which goes in a different place to the hat, and is on the back of a different chair by the end of the day. I have left more of them in more church halls than I could count.

So you do what I did. You leave the hat at home on a Friday, you tell yourself it is only ten minutes to the car, and you spend the whole walk with your ears aching and one hand on your head.

What I had wrong

Here is the bit I got most wrong, and I suspect a lot of us have.

I thought the problem was the hair. I thought if I just had the sort of hair that did not mind, I could wear a hat like anybody else.

It turns out that was never it.

The problem was the grip. A hat has to hold on to your head to stay there, and whatever is holding on to your head is pressing on your hair. What I needed was something that did not have to grip at all, because it was not relying on my head to keep it on. It was held in place from the neck.

A hood and a scarf in one piece, with a relaxed fit. It took me forty winters and one conversation at the hairdresser’s to work that out.

Then I saw one at Janine’s

A few weeks ago I was in the chair on a Friday when a woman came in out of the rain for the next appointment, about my age, in a long ribbed hood the colour of a good red wine that went round her neck and hung down over her coat.

She pushed it back with one hand and sat down, and Janine said, in the voice she uses for all of us, “Well, I do not have much to undo there.” I had a good look in the mirror. I am not proud of it. Her hair was still where somebody had left it.

I asked her what it was, of course, with a head full of foils. She said it was from Manchester Boutique, a small British boutique that has been quietly dressing women our age for a few years now, and that it was called the Iris. They had a sale on.

It is one piece, which is the whole point of it. There is a soft ribbed hood, and the hood flows straight down into two long scarf ends, so there is no hat and no scarf and nothing to match or to lose. You can wrap the ends round your neck, knot them loosely, or let them hang open over your coat. It comes in grey, black, khaki, cream and burgundy, and it is one size. I took the burgundy, because I had looked at that woman’s all the way through my foils. I ordered it that evening.

It is a soft, gentle ribbed feel, comfortable against the skin. It covers your head, your ears and your neck, and because the hood is relaxed it slips on and off easily, rather than flattening everything down the way a tight hat can. On it goes, one wrap of the ends, and you are out of the door.

That is really all there is to it. It is not complicated. It is just two things that should always have been one thing.

What happened at Tatton

We go to Tatton Park most years around now, Geoff and the labrador and me, to walk round the parkland and look at the deer. Anyone who has done it will tell you there is nothing between you and the Pennines out there. It is open grass and old oaks and a wind that goes straight through you, and I have done that walk every autumn for years with one hand on my head and my shoulders up by my ears.

This Sunday my hair was two days old and still behaving, and I put the Iris on in the car park and wrapped the ends round once. We walked for over an hour. Somewhere past the first big herd I noticed that I had taken my hand down from my head and that I had been talking to Geoff, quite normally, with my shoulders where shoulders belong.

Three women asked me about it before we had got back to the car. The first was a woman on the path with a pair of binoculars, who lowered them, looked at me rather than the stag, and asked where it had come from. The second was a younger woman in the queue at the tearoom, who wanted it for her mother and asked me to spell the name.

The third was Rhona. I worked with Rhona for eleven years and she has never in her life said anything nice about what anyone had on. We ran into her and her husband by the tearoom door. I pushed the hood back to say hello, and she looked at my head for a good long moment and said, You have had your hair done. Then she said, Where is your hat? From Rhona, that is a standing ovation.

What I noticed more than the asking, though, was how little I thought about it. I had no hat to carry about, and no scarf to leave on a chair. When I got too warm at the table I pushed the hood back and it just sat there on my shoulders, attached to me, waiting.

Three things I have learned since

One. Think about your coat. It looks well over a dark coat, and it comes in five colours, so go for the one you would be glad to see in the hall. Grey and black if you like things quiet. I wanted the burgundy, and I have no regrets.

Two. Wrap it your way. One turn round the neck with the ends hanging is how I wear it for a walk. Knotted loosely if it is blowing. Left open over your coat if you are only going to the car. There is no wrong way.

Three. It is one size. It is a relaxed fit with long ends, so there is nothing to measure and nothing to get wrong. Have a look at the listing before you order, but I did not have to guess at anything.

About the price

I want to be straightforward about this, because it was the thing that made me suspicious.

The Iris is £24.95. It was £50.00.

My first thought, honestly, was that there had to be a catch, because I pay more than that to have my hair done, and that is rather the point of the whole exercise.

There is no catch that I have found. They are a small boutique selling directly, so there is no department store taking a cut in the middle, and they have a sale on at the moment.

I did what I imagine you are doing now and went and read the reviews before I ordered. Just over three hundred of them, sitting at 4.2 stars. Not the suspiciously perfect five you see on some websites, which if I am honest made me trust it rather more. One woman from Mobberley had written, “I have one by the front door now and I have stopped looking for my hat, which is just as well because I have no idea where it is.”

Then I ordered a grey one for June, because I could already hear the phone call if I did not.

What I would tell you if we were friends

If you and I were sat in that tearoom, with our boots steaming and a pot going cold and the dog under the table, this is what I would say.

If you have started leaving the house on a cold morning with no hat and one hand on your head, it is worth ten minutes of your evening to go and look.

Not because a hood will change your life. It will not. But there is something in walking across a field in November with warm ears and your shoulders down, and then taking your hood off in the warm and still looking like yourself, and I would rather you had that this winter than another forty of what I had.

Two practical things. The sale is on at the moment, and the popular colours are the ones that go first. And it has only just turned cold, so I would not leave it until it has really set in.

Janine asked me the other week what I had done differently, because she had not had so much to put right. I told her it was the hood. She said not to tell the others.

Maggie