My hair might have been a person in its own right. Thick, dark, exuberant, for the first part of its life it had to be closely restrained lest it got too tangled up in other people’s business. I could sit on it before realising, at 12, that I needed to be able to manage it myself instead of having my mum spend 20 minutes every morning twisting it into a tight plait.

Reader, I was unable to manage it then and, truth be told, ever since. I mean, I try. At one point not brushing it every morning formed part of a misguided and self-defeating feminist one-student protest against anti-intellectual primping which included wearing wildly unflattering chunky polonecks and, yes, dungarees.

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve had my hair keratin straightened and coloured and endured the humiliation of pointed conversations about immigrants by the Grandes Dames clientele of a posh High St Ken hairdressers. My money was, presumably, as good as theirs.

Last year my current hairdresser, Hugo Poon, cut it quite short in order to capitalise on its innate curliness. The Hong Kong weather is not conducive to sleek locks unless you are born to them, my dears. For at least half of the year trying to blow dry or heat style your hair in any meaningful way results in disintegrating into a sweaty pool. No matter what product you use or how expertly you do your time-consuming do, 10 minutes outdoors and it degenerates to a frizzy ball.

Hugo and I have decided, therefore to let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. If it’s long I can tie it up like most other women do here so that it doesn’t add to the overall sweaty mess effect in 30C+ and humidity of over 85%.  Generally I don’t bother blow drying my hair now and now that it is no longer as thick as it was, it dries quite quickly into summer beachy waves. But, with my #lbt, I’ve soon tired of putting it back it an elastic, now matter how silken and bright, so I’ve now found myself experimenting with hair ornaments.

The first shop to benefit from my boredom was the extremely high end Alexandre Zouairi. Their offerings here are brightly coloured and, shall we say, highly attuned to the local market and the usual hordes of weekend shoppers from the mainland (“Yes, that is real hand-dyed fur on that crazy claw, madam”) and they don’t tend to have much stuff that aligns with my taste. Still it’s sparkly.

Recently I’ve turned to little producers on Etsy for some of their novelties. As I write I await a hand-carved wooden hair fork in the shape of a fox in the post from Nizhniy Novogorod. The bun cases remind me of my mum, who always wore her hair this way, sans case, leaving a trail of hairpins wherever she’d been

This will be my look from now on. Neat and tidy. Practice makes perfect. This is part of my ornament collection. Tiaras are not included here.