We’d begun to notice it in the photographs: the baby’s hair was getting long. This isn’t the sort of thing you’re meant to care about with a baby, not really. One of the rights babies hold is that of being dishevelled, to have food on their clothes and inexplicable dirt under their tiny fingernails. But the baby’s hair was getting long; drifting into his forehead like the swept-aside fringe of a Noughties indie rocker, curling under and touching the collar of his vest at his neck. The baby’s hair was getting long and while we may have been observing this for a while, silently to ourselves, at the weekend the notion of a haircut was raised and we realised that we had to do something about it.

What a strange, guilt-inducing thing it is to put beauty standards upon a baby. This happens all the time, of course, from the minute they come out. We pierce their ears and put them in certain colours and hold them up on tiny little pedestals. I spent a couple of minutes Googling hairdressers recommended by the local parenting WhatsApp group but it felt preposterous, really. The notion of sitting him in a tiny chair with a little gown, unthinkable! Impossible. In the end, it happened in the garden on a Sunday afternoon when nothing much else was going on. M walked out of the back door one with the little round-ended scissors we cut his nails with and there, while LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’ rattled out of the stereo, I combed the strands with my fingers and took the small metal blades above the baby’s ear.

In the seconds it took I was back in the kitchen of Treehouse, M nervously sat on the folding step-stool, pair of floristry scissors - the sharpest I had - in my hand. The confines of lockdown had us all watching YouTube videos for a short back and sides, nervously taking our lovers’ freshly washed hair between a comb and our fingers. I’d cut hair before; in a windowless bathroom in Brooklyn, one hungover weekday. Earlier, when I was 16, a friend came over after school and left with her waist-length hair slashed to her shoulders. When we emerged in the kitchen my mother mostly nodded, said, “well, that’s another string to your bow”. Still, M and I never got through a lockdown haircut without a tense little argument. In the end, when it was allowed, we went round to my sister’s garden. A lone practical woman in a household of three smart boys, she delivered something passable in 15 swift minutes after two glasses of wine.

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I did not give the baby a short back and sides. As we established while the tiny little scissors were in my hands, we just wanted to make him look less unkempt. Remove the little owlish tufts above his ears. He’s always had a lot of hair; came out with a neat auburn head of fuzz, like a woodland creature. “My tiny ginger son has arrived”, I announced him in a text to my best friends, a satisfying outcome after months of joking that I was destined to bear a small redheaded boy, without knowing any of these things for certain. But within six weeks he shed it all, aside from a stubborn patch of mousy down at the nape of his neck. The beginnings of the mullet, the residue of that newborn fur; I would absentmindedly stroke it and feel the weight of time passing.

What emerged in its wake was an icy blonde that strangers still comment on but I was never surprised by; I was blonde when I was small, as were my siblings, as were their children. As a Tin-Tin tuft and an inexplicably sharp hairline and a morning fluff as gravity-defying as a duckling’s tail it has always made total sense to me; as much a logical part of him as the noises he makes when he’s determined. I had made this, it was borne of me. And this is the strangeness of such a thing: we can be fascinated by it, these huge, marvellous nothings, as we can immediately know that they were always meant to be that way.

But I hadn’t anticipated cutting it. In time the haircuts will become as routine as the doctors’ appointments and the trips to the dentist, the nursery pick-ups and the birthday parties and the new shoes. He will be bribed and cajoled and congratulated and afterwards we shall say, “Gosh, he looks so smart!” while a part of me thinks about that auburn woodland creature. But we are still in the land of first things. And so I made M stick his hand out for the hair that I cut, and I made sure he clenched his fist against the breeze. And I whisked them inside and upstairs before the wind caught them, these strands of worthless, priceless gold. There, in the ribbon box, was one thin enough - with stripes of mustard and navy - to tie them together.

There are still tickets left for the savour members’ Why Women Grow book event. There will be free vodka cocktails! We’ll talk about sisterhood, and our relationship to the soil, and share stories from behind the scenes of the question that became a book that became a podcast and an exhibition and a point of communion. You’re very welcome to bring a friend - I can’t wait to see you there. Tickets here.

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