A prevailing childhood memory of mine is of my mother cutting my hair. We were living in a flat in Isleworth, I would have been around four or five years old. I had recently started school, having recently moved to the UK, and my grasp on English was well behind that of my peers. She cut my hair into a perfectly reasonable, if not quite perfect, bob. When I saw myself in the mirror, I cried. My complaint? ‘I look like a pumpkin!’
This is one of my first memories of London, and indeed, of my life. A topic that might be wrongly dismissed as shallow or trivial, our hair (or lack thereof) often relates strongly to our perceptions of ourselves, our image and our identity. That is why I believe that hair can be a neat segue into storytelling, about ourselves and society at the time.