The ageing process kind of snuck up on me. There I was a footloose, fancy free kinda gal. Got married, had a baby, got my first grey hair. Hang on, grey hair? Hmm, I thought that only started to happen when you got older, much older. Well it did for everyone else in my family. So childbirth= grey hair? Oh ok. It’s just a couple, they are kind of cute. We’ll just ignore them. Second baby, and hang on a second what’s going on up top there? Those three or four strands have turned into a bushal. Baby turns into a toddler and what the hell…it’s a grey forest up there.

With a disgusted fascination I part my hair in the middle. WHAT’S going on up there? My family are slow greyers. My Nana still has a lot of natural colour and she is 80 this year, my mum seems to be paddling in the same gene pool, so naturally I supposed that I would follow that lineage right? No. It seems not. I’m rowing off to the land of grey. Uncharted waters with no one to guide me.

What to do? What to do?

It doesn’t seem particularly socially acceptable for a woman in her 30’s to be actively grey. (Now there’s a term…”actively grey”.) Do I embrace it and get a funky hair cut, showing that I can still be relatively young looking with grey hair?

Do I deny it ever existed and dye the hell out of it? Grey hair?… Not for me!…Oh you have some, you poor thing.

Do I swap all my silver jewellery for gold and try to coerce it to look blonde?

What to do, what to do?

Grey hair seems to be a lot more acceptable once you hit a certain age benchmark. The graceful age of 50? 60?…that means I have a little while to ponder about going grey disgracefully. Looking in the mirror again. It’s still there, silently doubling the troops. Each look in the bathroom mirror, show that those frizzy grey strands have fortified themselves and are working their way towards complete take over. How could this be?

Looking closely at other peoples heads, I try and glean which approach to go for.

George Clooney, the salt and peppered look is quite becoming. Women swoon over him. That guy from The Gruen Transfer, Todd Sampson does grey in a funky I’m still young and with it way…except I’m not a man, so darn it, that’s not going to work for me.

At an ayurvedic seminar recently the crowd was a sea of grey hair, dangly earrings and sweeping shawls. It was a looking that was working for many of them, but was it me? Could I work it?

I’m not being inundated with floods of younger women embracing their grey hair. Does that mean there are very few of us out there? Judie Dench is a gorgeous woman sporting a head of grey hair. However, she has quite a head start on years to me.

I’m not in the least bothered by grey hair on other people. Old, young or otherwise. So why is it bothering me?

Because there was no warning. No ease into transition period.

It was, ah, there are a few up there… to DEAR god whats going on!

Tricia from little eco footprints recently posted about using henna on her hair. I love the idea of using something natural instead of chemicals, but is that the colour for me? Gorgeous dark locks with hints of red….My skin colouring is hard to match at the best of times. How do I stop myself from looking like Richmond from the IT Crowd?

Richmond works it. Todd Sampson works it. Judie Dench works it. Now I just have to work it.

So until I work out HOW to work it, will you excuse me while I go and have another disgusted but totally fascinated look in the bathroom mirror?