A good haircut, it hardly needs to be said, is essential to the Tart life. And I had become a bit complacent about this. It can easily happen when you live in London -- a city where you can throw a dart at the ‘h’ section of the Yellow Pages and find a well-trained stylist.

So when I moved tto Manhattan three years ago, I was laughably unprepared for the epic struggle that lay ahead. As far as hair goes, New York does not give up its secrets easily. If I’d had known how ugly it would get, I would have hopped straight back on the plane.

I started with high hopes and a tip from a colleague; a beautiful girl with a precise short cut. Fifty bucks, cash only, downtown. She warned that the place wasn’t fancy. Fancy-schmancy. Did I care? I did not.

'Salon de Sade’ (the names have been changed to protect the barely competent) at first appeared to be ideal for Tart coiffure. It had S& M masks, chains and whips on the walls. Colouring took place in an electric chair. If you had to wait, copies of magazines with titles like Bondage for Beginners and Tattoo Monthly helped while away the time. There was also an enormous backlit stained glass of three winged men having oral sex.

The salon doubled as a gathering place for the demimonde of SoHo. Listening to the stories they told of drugs, clubs and sex on gym floors made me realise I wasn’t getting out nearly enough.

Trouble was, the stylist often paid more attention to the gossip than my head. ‘Oh look,’ my husband would invariably say when I got home, ‘there’s another clump she missed. Let me get the kitchen scissors.’

I decided to gather my courage and my dollars and go upscale. It was a big decision. Each expensive Manhattan salon has its own abstruse dance of protocol -– whom to tip and when, when to put on your robe on and where. The procedures are seemingly arbitrary and as laced with nuance as high-level masonry. Social embarrassment lurks everywhere.

I knew I’d made a mistake when I arrived at ‘Face-lift Chateau’ just off Madison Avenue. It had an aging clientele, a liveried doorman and loads of that gilt décor that Donald Trump loves. An impatient Upper East Side crone almost knocked me down to get through the door first. If I’d been thinking, I would have let her, faked a debilitating injury, and got the hell out.

The stylist was a smug, sexy French guy. It quickly became apparent why he couldn’t wipe that grin off his face. He had an assistant, a tightly-clad blonde babe who treated him as if he was chief cardiac transplant surgeon at Colombia Presbyterian and the combs and clips she reverently placed into his outstretched hand were precise surgical instruments.

When he had finished, he stood back while the babe lifted the black rubber mat from my shoulders (this job was presumably too demeaning for him) and angled the mirror for a better view of the maestro’s work. If only his skill had matched his attitude. My fringe was crooked, and not in a good way, although the salon took my $135, not including tips, with a straight face.

‘Are you quite sure you don’t want me to have a go?’ my husband asked, when he saw the sorry result, ‘I used to cut my sisters’ hair when I was a teenager.’

Despondent and desperate, I veered wildly downmarket. I’d read rhapsodic reports about a barber’s shop in Chelsea where a woman was cutting hair for 15 dollars. The lines were long so I went on a weekday afternoon to beat the crowds.

I didn’t wait long at all. Twenty minutes later, I looked as though I’d been press ganged into a desert tour with the US Marines. ‘It’ll fluff up after it’s been washed,’ the barber suggested helpfully. It didn’t.

Hoping dumb luck would turn up a result, I took a chance on a walk-in at ‘Mondo Anorexics’ in mid-town one bitingly cold February afternoon. The salon is famous for its supermodel clientele and most of the people slinking around that day looked as though they got up early just to practice their disdainful sneers.

I made the inevitable disrobing gaffe, ‘You take the robe and the hangers and you step to the right,’ the coat-check girl explained. But she quickly forgave me and I felt better. Besides, there was free coffee and no doorman.

The stylist had the wasted, heroin-chic look of someone who appears lounging over Kate Moss in avant-garde magazines. He clipped and shaved for forty minutes or so before standing back and announcing grandly ‘I like it!’ Perhaps it just slipped his mind to ask whether I liked it.

I began trying to justify the cost of flying back to London for the 30 quid special at Base Cuts on Portobello Road when a fashionable friend whose fringe is intentionally crooked, told me about a woman in Union Square.

‘You will stand there, please,’ the assistant at ‘Treat ‘em Mean’ said briskly. She pointed to an apparently arbitrary spot in the middle of the room. I stood there. Exposed, alone. Other patrons, smug in the knowledge that they had already passed this ordeal, stared. The assistant reappeared with a robe and directed me to a cubicle about three feet away. I slipped the robe on over my shirt, wondering why I needed to be in a cubicle to do this. I soon found out. ‘You’re supposed to take your shirt off, before you put the robe on. Otherwise it’ll get wet,’ the stylist snapped. It was very clear she was having a bad day and she saw no need to hide it from me. I paid $70 plus tip, promising myself I’d do the whole robe thing better next time, but at another salon.

More than a year passed before the gods took pity on me. I was in Sydney on vacation and found a British-trained Aussie who did a fine job for fifty dollars. ‘You don’t wanna let those Americans near your head,’ he warned as I left, teary-eyed with gratitude. ‘I’ve worked there. They’re eff-ing hopeless. You know they don’t even need a licence to practice.’

My hair had become a silent testament to that. I stretched the Aussie cut out as long as I could. But the moment was approaching when I would have to put my trust and my self-esteem into the hands of another ill-trained bozo. I planned, then abandoned, a scheme to call every hairdresser in Manhattan and demand to know if they had British-trained cutters. You read about the high profile ones in the glossies, but they’re so much in demand that even they must think the prices they can charge are hilarious.

Then a friend gave me the name of her place in NoLita, owned and staffed by Japanese. After struggling over the phone with a significant language barrier, I turned up with modest expectations.

There was no dance with cubicles and gowns. A young woman shampooed and then pressed a few shiatsu points so expertly it felt as though I’d been on holiday for a week. Akiko listened while I told her what I wanted. ‘Just the French ingénue look,’ I said vaguely, not really caring at that point.

While she worked, I enquired about her training. Four years in Tokyo. My spirits rose. ‘You have thick hair, like the Japanese,’ she said, waving a pair of thinning scissors. She told me about her dog. I told her about mine.

She cut my hair beautifully and charged 45 dollars. For the first time, since I had moved here, I felt as though New York was really reaching out to me.

But it turned out to be illusory. The last time I called for an appointment, Akiko was absent on pregnancy leave.

‘Pregnant?’ I felt betrayed. She wasn’t even showing last time I’d seen her. How could she leave me like this?

‘It’s a difficult pregnancy,’ the receptionist explained.

‘When will she be back?’

‘Not for several months.’

And so it begins all over again.

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