Yesterday, I visited my hairdresser in town. Since we moved here, she’s my eighth. You could say that I’ve become something of a hairdresser’s tart.

With Daylesford being a popular place for weddings, most hairdressers in town have cut their teeth on bridal parties. They’ve learnt the finer points of tact and diplomacy in their dealings with stressed-out brides and their hyped-up entourages, some of whom can be extremely rude.

All but three of my hairdressers have been very young. I’m not sure they understood the holy grail upon which women of my age embark in their quest for a style for their weirdly-behaved ‘mature hair’. That’s the age when the hair on our head starts to resemble hair on other, less prominent, parts of our body. But perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies: unlike most men of our age, at least we have bad-hair days as opposed to no-hair days.

Without exception, Daylesford’s hairdressers are exceptionally kind. One of them even gave me a discount after I told him I was involved in community work. I’m not sure whether it was the challenge of my hair, or the need to pursue a more manly career, but just as he’d begun to come to grips with my ‘do’, he left the salon for a job as a railway welder.

My current hairdresser is a bundle of energy. Filled with youthful ambition, she’s in the process of re-modelling her salon. There’s plaster dust everywhere.

On a large television screen on the wall, there’s normally a high rotation of thinly talented soft-porn acts belting out mindless pop songs. Now that it’s been disconnected, the salon’s delightfully peaceful. There were just the two of us and as my hairdresser cut, we chatted, something we’re usually denied by the background racket.

I was talking about how some men have unwisely decided to forego shampoo when washing their hair, when my hairdresser suddenly gasped. She’d caught the end of her finger between the blades of the scissors. It was a gusher.

We hurried to the back room where she struggled with the first-aid box before I took it from her. The box appeared to be covered in bloody fingerprints. She assured me they were from hair tints.

I applied two tight Band-Aids, hoping to staunch the flow, but it needed a third. We could continue another day if she preferred, I said, or I could drive her to the hospital for stitches.

She scoffed at the notion and told me that it would take more than a cut finger to stop her from working. She tore open another Band-Aid with her teeth and stuck it on for good measure. Anyway, she said, she had plans to finish the first coat of paint after closing time.

As I resumed my seat at the mirror, she told me that she cut her finger all the time. Once she did it with a new, ultra-sharp pair of scissors. She’d been cutting a filthy head of hair at the time and the cut had become infected. (I pondered whether it might have been a man who refused to use shampoo.)

When the cut failed to heal, a doctor had lanced and probed it for an offending hair filament (the very thought made me feel faint), but he’d found nothing and the infection had spread to her arm. Still she soldiered on, dosed up on antibiotics, her arm in a sling.

You’ve got to hand it country hairdressers. Even if the ‘do’ they give you stuns your partner into silence, your friends into eye-contact avoidance and the dog into growling as if he’s never seen you before, they tend to be a friendly, generous and courageous bunch.

I have nothing but admiration for my hairdresser. She’s efficient, business-savvy, has high standards of customer service and knows an absolute shirtload about mature hair. She can overcome any challenge with stoicism and grace… except when it comes to bridal parties. Those she flatly refuses to deal with.