I cannot, in my life, claim to have invented many things. No medicinal breakthrough. No plastic compounds. No movement in figure-skating. True, I was part of a committee of fat children in the Midlands who conceived, in 1988, the Cheese Lollipop – around 50g of cheap cheddar speared on a fork, and sucked on during marathons of CBBC classic Cities of Gold – but I was just a cog, a 15st cog, among other equally gifted and gigantic cogs.

It’s also true that I was part of that same committee of fat children who, having all moved into their adolescence, came up with the sherry cappuccino one desperate Christmas. The curdled layers of Nescafé and Somerfield Ruby will live on in the minds of all those who experienced it. Indeed, they probably also live on in the cups we used. It was viscous stuff*.

That aside, however, it’s clear that, in a version of It’s A Wonderful Life in which I took the James Stewart role, and plunged suicidally off the bridge, Bedford Falls would simply shrug and carry on with the eggnog, same as it always did. I haven’t really contributed to mankind’s magnificent struggle one iota.

However, there is one meagre, paltry innovation to which I feel I can lay claim in my otherwise uncreative life, and that is my hair. On Hallowe’en 2003 (note the date, hair historians, as I’m sure that there must be, somewhere – maybe at De Montford University, Leicester) I made drunkenly merry with a can of spray-in grey hair paint. On waking in the morning, I looked in the mirror and was astonished at what I saw. What I saw was The Hair of My Life. The Hair of My Soul. I had one icy whoosh of hair over my left eye. A blue-grey streak. A frosted lock. It looked a bit Eleanor Bron, a bit Lily Munster, a bit the wise monkey elder in The Lion King. Clearly, this was the Recipe of Me. I went to the hairdressers’, and got them to make me semi-grey permanently.

For the first three years, me and my hair were very happy. True, old people were apt to come up to me at bus stops and commiserate, (“Ooooh, you’re like me. I went completely grey at 29, after I had shingles. You want to get yourself one of those dye jobbies from Boots.”), but I felt that I was on some kind of Hair Quest. I felt that I was pushing the boundaries. I felt that I was creative.

Then the bomb fell. Last summer my brother Eddie – the maverick Cheese Lollipop committee member who, in 1988, had suggested that we concentrate our cutlery research solely on the fork – rang me from Brighton. “I’ve just seen a woman with your hair,” he said. “In Peacocks,” he added. “Buying leggings.”

Initially, I was flattered. I visit Brighton quite a lot. It was not outside the realm of possibility that this woman had seen my hair and simply been inspired. I couldn’t blame her. I am in the possession of hair dynamite.

Then my sister, also in Brighton, rang a month later. “I’ve seen five women with your hair,” she blurted out, immediately.

At this point, I must admit, I felt bad. These women had, fairly obviously, not copied their hair from me. They had copied it from the woman who copied me. They did not know their hair history.

I felt a little like Elvis Presley might have, on seeing someone with a quiff and wobbly legs whose primarily influence had not been him, but Shakin’ Stevens. The way that things were going, there was every chance that my hair would go down in history as “origin unknown”.

Then, a week before the end of the school term, things escalated dramatically, albeit mainly in my mind. Outside the school gates one morning – as startling as the sight of a polar bear – there was a mother with my hair. On my own patch! Bold as the slightly brassy grey tone her – clearly inferior – hairdresser had come up with!

While dealing with the fear of expiring in hair-dyeing obscurity had been unpleasant, this new scenario was a different kettle of fish altogether. I think that all women know what it means to have another woman steal your signature style. I recalled, from my teenage years, my friend Julie’s fury on noting that a female classmate had appropriated her then-trademark – a Puffa jacket, worn with badges on the elasticated hem. “It’s war,” she had declared, flatly, smoking a cigarette in Burger King, as you could in those days.

And, of course, this hair-stealing woman was, indeed, declaring war on me. For who would ever copy the hairstyle of someone they saw every day, if they thought that they looked worsewith it? The hair-stealing mother believed that my hair looked better on her. That it was, by and large, a good hairdo, but had been ruined by the addition of my face. She was dissing me. This was clearly the act that would lead to the outbreak of war.

But just how does one fight a hair war? Unsatisfyingly, this is the question I am currently stuck on, with another five weeks of the summer holidays to go, until I face my follicular nemesis again. The way I see it, I’ve got only three options. 1) Kill her – the sensible, but possibly immoral, option. 2) Kill myself – irresponsible, given my prominence in the pickup rota. 3) Get an entirely new do – frankly, I might as well be asked to traverse to Mordor and cast the One Ring into the Crack of Doom. I’m 32. I’m too old for that kind of quest. This is the hair, for better or worse, that I will die with.

So here I am, backed into a hair stand-off that I never asked for. I can’t believe there aren’t government guidelines on this kind of thing.

I’m tearing my hair out. *Maybe that was a revolutionary new plastic compound – and I just didn’t realise it.

Fellow creatures in need of humanity

A river in Alaska is having its gradient reduced to help salmon that swim upstream every year. The fish will have a more gradual incline to climb as they make their way from the ocean into Chester Creek to breed.

I love that we are doing things like this. By and large, human beings’ involvement with animals tends to make things incomparably worse for the latter. We set fire to their houses, eat their honey, make shoes out of their bums. If we’re not milking their bile into a pan, we’re rubbing cigarettes into their eyes or getting them to snitch on backpackers in airports, with ensuing bad feeling. It’s no wonder that, when animals see us coming, they run. We have been a bad neighbour to our simpler, slower, tasty, handbag-resembling friends.

Taking this into consideration, I’m all for this taking-care-of-the-animals side of humanity. I like us making things easier for the tired, horny salmon. Why should they thrash themselves into exhaustion and death on a river with a 1-in4 gradient, when we long ago invented the lock system? We could roll out this beneficence, and offer counselling for the considerable sexual dysfunctions of praying mantis couples; life-support systems for mayflies; air-travel for migrating birds; cornea transplants for bats.

Sad fête

Driving from Birmingham to the best town in the world, Aberystwyth, was a constant reminder of how badly the floods have affected – well, pretty much everywhere that isn’t London. Cafés, hotels and shops draped with banners reading: “Still Open – Fight The Flood! Your Village Needs You!” Fields punctured with impromptu, grassy ponds. Roads closed. And – save a lone, brave survivor – every sign for horse shows, agricultural shows, village fêtes and local festivals plastered with a damp “CANCELLED” sign. For many, many people, all of summer has been cancelled.

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