According to Allure's editors, few women over age 18 can get away with hair that falls below their breasts. This means that, for the past six years or so, I have been…well…what’s the opposite of ‘not getting away with’?

We were walking around Rome, as one does, last Saturday, when it suddenly hit me: this hair is ageing me.  Some people walk around the Eternal City looking at the magnificently crumbling buildings, others escape the snow fluttering outside by diving into the nearest trattoria. I did both, but I also got this realization that, closely approaching 40 (forty…jesus) my very long hair is no longer the stuff of attraction, but well, just a little bit too much, at least for me.

I don’t have split ends or walk around with greased lightning emanating from my roots; in fact, on an eighteen year old, I’m guessing my tresses would be the stuff of dreams. I’m not 18 any more though and I’m quite happy for it. All those old buildings were just contributing to my feeling as if I were grabbing at a quickly escaping youth.

Women’s relationship with their hair is intrinsic to their life. Men do not understand this; most of them view ‘going to the hairdresser’ as something they have to do in order not to end up with a weird-looking mullet or a huge un-Vileda like mop, at least before the widow’s peak starts to peak a little too much, at which point they resort to a shaving machine and lop the whole thing off on a 3mm setting after a shower.

We ladies are different. We dye it in various hues, curl it or straighten it (whatever is the opposite of what he have been blessed with) and generally spend so much money on it that we think other women will understand us when we justify an MP salary increase by saying that we need the money for our hair [for a better explanation, read Claire Bonello’s excellent opinion piece from Sunday].

Years ago, when I had ‘maths teacher hair’, I was generally so unsatisfied in my relationship that I would change my hair colour once every two months and thought short was ‘sexy’ or gamine. I went from a natural black (mine), to red (dark and light), brown and eventually a full-on ash-blonde in twelve months. My hair was like a box of Quality Street: contents constantly changed colour and once I had one, I just moved on to the next.

I actually got my passport done with this hair and ended up explaining my terrorist-style face change to every single passport checker in the world. In Thailand, at 3am, the girl behind the bullet-proof glass actually giggled when she saw the person in the photo – short, almost spiked, super blonde – and the one standing in front of her, who was sporting very dark, long black hair, practically like hers, albeit slightly bed-head after an 8-hour flight.

I never understood why women lop their hair off the moment they have a child: practicality suddenly takes over and the option of a blow-dry has to be balanced with burping and nappy-changing. Yet I don’t have any (children, that is, or at least those without paws) and for me, lopping off half a metre of keratin is simply about acting my age. Yet to describe this as scary is putting it mildly: I really, really am terrified. For some reason, it feels like ripping half my heart out. And a lung too.

The Writer adores long hair. He is why I let my hair grow in the first place. ‘Do you mind if I chop it off?’ I asked him while he was playing on his iPad at Ferragamo. When he is absorbed in his ‘Death of Killers’ or whatever those games are called, I can never get his attention. ‘What? All of it?!’ he gasped. ‘Erm, no, just a big bunch of it.’ ‘Hmmm….crisis time’ he hummed, approving of the shoes. ‘ Go on. Inti taf.’ It feels like being unfaithful.

So I called Alexander Carabott when we returned. ‘What happened in Rome?!’ he riposted, having seen me a couple of hours before our flight out. ‘Nothing. There’s too much of it’. Alex has been cutting my hair for the past twenty years. Vidal Sassoon-trained, there is nobody I trust more than him when it comes to whatever comes out of my scalp.

No-one knows more than hairdressers how intrinsic hair is to women’s lives and character. Somehow, they know us more than anybody else, simply by having been there every time we change it.  With his first cancellation – it is after all, the Christmas period and we do our hair around now even more than we normally do it at other times – I’m in.

And the hair is out.  Wish me luck: I am actually trembling. If you see a woman screaming and running through the streets of Gzira it will not be a mental institution escapee: that will be me, wondering what I’ve done to myself.