And exhale, gentle readers, the ladykingstonlives.com blog returns. Even I, a legend of optimism, did not think it right to post jolly news when the world was falling around so many people’s ears but as the first, tiny green shoots of normality returning begin to poke through the parched earth of the last two years I have decided that it might be time to lift the spirits of my devoted followers by updating some of the pieces I have written over the last 20 years. The following comes from a time when Saddam Hussein was still in power and woke was something that happened when you weren’t asleep.

‘My hairdresser was tending to my fabulous locks the other day when I regaled him with a story that would have been excised from that well-known misery memoir, ’Angela’s Ashes’ as being too cruel. As children, my sisters and I all had waist length hair which was washed weekly in a character forming combination of cold water and carbolic soap and then combed through without the benefit of either compassion or conditioner. Any sign of protest was met with a swift, sharp shock – usually a thwack from a hairbrush and a reminder that one had to suffer to be beautiful. (Didn’t we baby boomers have it easy?) Given the amount of suffering we collectively endured it seems in retrospect a national scandal that not one of us went on to become Miss World.

My older and very lovely sister took the message very much to heart as she demonstrated when she took to wearing plastic bags inside a pair of blonde, thigh length suede boots (Sadly not in her actual size) so that they would not be stained by the blood which poured from her blisters. Beat that, if you can, Opus Dei, with your softie hair shirts.

Which brings me to the burkha and the c word, an expletive which never crossed my mother’s lips – yes, Comfort. And of course c for Childline to which your modern infant would have turned to in an instant had it, like us, been expected to walk barefoot across the fields to school each morning because my mother sincerely believed that it improved the complexion, especially if pneumonia didn’t get you. The unsung advantage of the burkha is that far from being a symbol of oppression it allows the more pressed mother to drive their children to school in their pyjamas without being spotted, especially by over-zealous traffic policemen who seem to think nightwear behind the wheel is a cause for great mirth, but that dear reader is a story for another day.

C is also for cruel as was the remark that my son made to me the other morning. I later informed him by text that I had gone to live in Baghdad where people were not so unkind to their mothers and he received another text which read ’Thrilled that your saintly mother has joined me in my fight to overthrow cruel and oppressive regimes. Signed S. Hussein’. My next blog will be on the letter D for ’Don’t mess with your mother’. They have to learn’.