There is more to life than hair, but it's a good place to start. For my female readers I am sure this rings true. Men have it so easy, don't they? Some of them might worry about being follically challenged, but maintaining what hair they do have is hardly taxing. We women have to worry about the cut, the colour, the style and, for those of us who appear in public from time to time, the need for a blow-dry. I am told by well-placed sources that the late Diana, Princess of Wales, saw the hairdresser every morning. So, I read, does Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of American Vogue. Behind every woman of note, then, stands a hairdresser.

Consider the credit crunch. In Britain, the highest-profile casualty of this was Northern Rock, a bank that had relied on the wholesale money markets to fund its lending. When that supply of cash dried up, so did the bank. But at the point of crisis, when no one in the government could decide which of the Treasury, the Bank of England or the Financial Services Authority should be communicating with the media, who was the main beneficiary of this indecision? Answer: whoever is hairdresser to Angela Knight, the chief executive of the British Bankers' Association. Her constant appearances in broadcast and print media to comment on the Northern Rock debacle plugged the gap left by our reticent regulators. Step forward, then, that man (or woman) whose livelihood received a direct boost from the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market.