In case the title has got you worried, fear not - this isn't an excuse for me to write a column in the nude. Of course, for all you can tell from just seeing words on a page, I might write my scribblings in the altogether every week. "Andrew tapped away on the typewriter in his y-fronts (strange place to have a typewriter - ba-dum!)." But no, the title refers not to the (in)famous musical of that name, but to the straggly, furry stuff we all (well, most of us - sorry Dad!) have on our heads.

Last weekend my daughter had a friend here for a sleep-over. It was somewhat unplanned and unexpected, I might add. Actually, since I've got five minutes I'll give you the whole story. Originally, my in-laws were looking after the grand-daughter of one of their friends (the grand-daughter lives with the grandparents) and the girl in question was going to stay overnight with them. This was last Saturday, and my daughter (who is the same age and knows her very well) was going to go over and sleep at the in-laws to keep her company. However, after about an hour or so we got The Call. "I want to come home now" was the plaintive wail up the telephone line - and of course, since this would have left the friend, er, friendless, we agreed to have them both! Consequently we went from a child-free evening, to a night of twice the normal dosage!

Hysteria aside, it really wasn't much of a problem, and they did go to sleep very quickly (after a story or three that is). My daughter succumbed first, and the next thing I heard was the friend trying to wake her up. When I asked why, she explained that my daughter was snoring too loudly! Although my suggestion that she could just stick her fingers in her ears fell on, erm, deaf ears, the friend nevertheless soon gave up the unequal struggle and fell asleep too. Interestingly enough, when they woke me up at just before seven in the morning, the friend did have the thoughtfulness to sympathetically observe, even as she was waking me up, that I was looking a bit tired! I suppose it's the thought that counts...

Anyway (having filled in the story so far like the opening scene of an episode of "Allo Allo") when I took the friend back to the in-laws' on Sunday morning, prior to her being collected, mother-in-law's question was, "Have you brushed your hair?" (Er, to the little girl that is, not me.) Of course, no adult ever asks that question as a genuine inquiry - what we really mean is, "Why haven't you brushed your hair?" With speed that a professional assassin would have been proud of, my mother-in-law produced a hairbrush and set to work. And as my daughter's friend stood there, making agonised expressions while her hair was brushed, I found myself wondering just what started all this hair business in the first place.

Why do we think hair should be neat or styled or shaped, rather than just left to its own devices. One of my favourite quotes from Carla Lane's "Bread" was the wild Freddie Boswell explaining that, "My hair is Sagittarius hair - it does its own thing." Given the choice surely all the children, and half the men, in the country would do the same. My daughter, just like her friend, is similarly reluctant to brush her hair, or to have it brushed. Sometimes she has two pigtails, one on either side, and somehow she thinks that this should give her diplomatic immunity from brushing the rest.

Not that I am in much of a position to talk, I suppose. I have inherited my Mum's thick hair (thick hair that is, not thick head - thank you!) and it does grow at an alarming rate. However, I am almost as reluctant to go to the hairdresser as I am to visit the dentist. I had mine cut a couple of weeks ago, so at the moment it's quite short - but it's the first time I've had it cut in probably six months or more, so it had got to quite a length before it was finally cropped. When it gets long and flowing I like to think of it as Byronesque, although I will admit that this is probably just a euphemism for scruffy. My wife quipped to the hairdresser, as indeed my Mum and Dad used to say, that there was enough hair cut off to stuff a pillow. However, in my defence, can I point out that nobody has ever attempted this feat, so such wild claims of a virtual EC hair mountain are currently unsubstantiated.

The hairdresser (who was very nice, although I have my suspicions that she may not have been a natural crimson) was politely critical of my having left it so long (both literally and in terms of time). Apparently the ends were brittle which indicates that the hair is too long; she said that my hair should have a natural shine (don't ask me, I'm just telling you what she said) which the excess length was preventing. The amount of nourishment generated by my scalp wasn't enough for the amount of hair I had, so it was all suffering. Is any of this making any sense to anybody? If this was a Loreal ad I would put the science part here, but what do I know about hair? I'm a man! Anyway, it's cut now (boy is it cut now!) and I shall either have to go back sooner the next time to avoid another telling off, or alternatively find another hairdresser.

When we were children, my Dad used to cut my hair, ,and my brother's. I'm not convinced that any of the subjects on his Ministerial Training Course prepared him for this (although Matthew, Mark, Luke and Vidal Sassoon does have a certain ring to it) so I have to assume that it was for purely financial reasons. Somewhere along the line, and as a child of the 70s I find myself instinctively blaming K-Tel, he acquired a... well, a THING. This THING was a slim white device, not unlike a ruler, but with a razor-blade inserted at one end, and it was designed to slice hair off. Now, in theory, slicing hair off with a razor blade should be fine - but somehow, the ingenious design of this device was such that no razor blade put into it would retain any degree of sharpness for any length of time. Consequently the device would drag the hair kicking and screaming from the head of the (also kicking and screaming) child in question.

There's an episode of "The Simpsons" where Lisa has to have braces fitted, and the dentist, portrayed as a softly-spoken torturer, shows her the equipment he will be using. His cold and clinical tone belies the joviality of the words as he makes comments like, "And this happy chap is the gouger." Well, it wouldn't be out of place to picture Dad wielding his razor/slicer THING and sending a similar chill up the spine. I will say, however, that the haircuts (and Dad did cut my hair for many years) were all fine, albeit he often found himself wrestling with the knotty theological conundrum of whether it was his cutting that wasn't quite level, or my ears. I don't honestly think, though, that an alternative career as a barber would have quite suited my Dad - never once did he ask me whether I was watching the football that afternoon, or where I was going for my holidays that year.

But, getting back on track, I still don't know why hair has become such an important issue. Although I know I shouldn't, I admit that I've seen people with wild straggly hair (wilder and stragglier even than mine at its most Byronesque) and my first thought was, well, that they looked right scruffs. Why should it matter? Why should hair styled and trimmed look 'neat' while hair that just lies around, or sticks out at obtuse angles, is considered 'untidy'? Just the word 'comb-over' is enough to indicate the lengths that people will go to in order to make their hair look (so they think) presentable, as if just leaving those three strands to hang feebly down the side (and is their one reader of this who isn't now thinking of the character from "Naked Video"?) is somehow a social disgrace.

I was going to end this column with the thought that hair is a lot like having a child - it's always your responsibility, you keep it clean and try to look after it as best you can, but still there are days when you just can't do a damn thing with it! However, that wasn't really what got me started, that's just a cheap one-liner thrown in on a whim. But as I watched my in-laws' friends' granddaughter (you are following this aren't you?) with her face contorting in agony over a simple hair-brush, I did wonder why we do it.

When they are born, apparently, babies have certain instinctive reflexes - if you put something in their hands, for example, they will grasp it; indeed if Professor Robert Winston is to be believed (and despite the moustache, I think he can be trusted on this) they can even breathe underwater. However, I've never heard it claimed that one of nature's instincts, programmed into babies from birth so as to aid their survival, is the 'brushing of the hair' reflex.

Making them brush their hair so that it, and they, look presentable is simply a convention we insist on. Similarly with washing hair I suppose - left to its own devices I'm told that hair will eventually 'clean' itself, albeit not until it has gone through a nasty greasy phase, like many a teenage boy. But we regiment our children to wash their hair regularly, to keep it neat, to be clean and tidy, etc, etc. None of these are bad things especially, but it perhaps does us good once in a while to remember not to overdo it. Very few haircuts turn out to be life or death situations, at least in my experience. So although I would feel ashamed (and rightly so) if we didn't make sure our daughter had shoes that fit her, or clean clothes for school, I can't honestly say that I would feel one jot of shame if she went the whole weekend without brushing her hair. How shocking!

I'm sure that the time will come all too soon when her hair becomes one of her obsessions (probably around about the time that 'boyfriends' becomes another) so in the meantime, at least at home, my daughter is quite welcome to let her hair down.