I have decided I HATE cold water. Especially when I am trying to titivate myself so that when I go for a job interview I don’t look old and grey and stuffy and middle aged. Mind you, I haven’t found too many librarians, even ones in their senior years who are that stuffy. Some have been quite proper, but none of them have been stuffy like the archetypical twin set and pearls, grey hair in a bun with round spectacles and dowdy length skirts and sensible shoes image of a lady librarian.

I think it is the idea of the grey hair that bothers me. Not so much as it makes that much difference to my image of me, I am almost game enough to dye my hair flaming scarlet if I could think of a good enough reason and wouldn’t feel too silly while it grew out. It’s the information about older women getting jobs back in the work force. With rare exception, according to the reports on women’s employment I have read, few find it easy to get work if their honourably earned grey hair is showing. There are times when I think our Islamic sisters have the right of it; cover the wretched mop up and never have to worry what colour it is because it is hidden by pretty scarves that can be of any hue of the rainbow.

Yet I have earned my grey hairs honestly, and in some senses I resent the idea that one of the reasons I am colouring my hair is to hide the evidence that my hair does not look as young as the rest of me feels. Why is it that the world seems to insist that women have to look young all the time? Yet when we have reached more mature years and the gradual encroachment of greying hair, and have the time to invest once again in career and world because we have already done our child-raising bit, we are told that we need to do all this palaver with hair dye and anti-wrinkle cream so that we will stay “young forever”! Men don’t seem to have this problem. They have seemed to be able to grow wrinkly and grey with no loss of status of job seeking ability.

On the other hand, this may be changing. Just recently watching a video of some American programs I noticed with a certain bemusement the American adverts for such toiletries as hair colour, anti-wrinkle creams and moisturisers are starting to be advertised to men. I don’t know whether to be amused or not! It’s been a standing joke since our daughter was born that my husband started to loose his hair with the sudden shock of fatherhood. As he was in his early twenties at the time there was a fair amount of pressure on us to visit one of these ‘hair replacement clinics’, but my dear man had what he called “better things” to spend our money on.

I don’t know; the history of toiletries is one that has been pretty evenly divided between males and females all through history until the last hundred years or so, as far as I understand. So perhaps the encouragement of men to titivate themselves with colouring the grey off their temples and de-wrinkling their faces is merely returning us to a parity of preening that we had before …

But this little peahen still hates cold water to rinse her newly coloured russet locks in because someone decided to wash their gear for work tomorrow and used up all the hot water before I had rinsed the dye out. But I do feel “younger”, so perhaps there is something to the idea that having no grey in your hair does imply that one looks as young as one feels!