SOMETIMES everything goes tiddly-up when you haven't even tried and I seem to have ended up in the doghouse despite best efforts. After last week's shenanigans I fear I may now get blackballed by not only my hairdresser but my dentist as well - so if you see a grey-haired old hag out in a few month's time with a wonky haircut and blackened teeth and she looks a bit like me, please spare a thought.

SOMETIMES everything goes tiddly-up when you haven't even tried and I seem to have ended up in the doghouse despite best efforts. After last week's shenanigans I fear I may now get blackballed by not only my hairdresser but my dentist as well - so if you see a grey-haired old hag out in a few month's time with a wonky haircut and blackened teeth and she looks a bit like me, please spare a thought.

As most people will have found by now, you rarely seem to have use for a cheque book nowadays. Once upon a time the trusted old A/C Payee crossed pieces of paper with your bank details and moniker on it were part of our daily currency - a quaint habit, which together with decent handwriting, seems to have been mothballed towards the end of the last millennium. Now it's all cyberspace banking on-line or, till-side, chip and pinning. Which was my problem. I'd finished my last chequebook after about a year, and found a new one in a kitchen drawer - pristine and unused.

So your find Mrs Hawkins poised for the big dyeing session at the hairdressers - the full expensive works which means a whole head of grey roots being transformed into brown first, after which your barnet is washed and dried, followed by the putting on of the dreaded rubbery cap with holes in it. Gentlemen, you really don't need to know all this, but at this point a kind of long hook is put through each hole, which agonisingly drags through a small tress so you end up looking like you've got galloping alopecia or at the least been attacked by hair-eating moths. (Of course, this was the precise point that a friend's husband walked in and copped me. “Ha,” I said, “not my best look” and turned beetroot). Anyway next this scraggy stuff is bleached, all is washed and dried again and then your new brown-with-light-streaked hair is cut, styled and dried for the third time. It takes light years and the preferred method of payment is a cheque. As it happened, next day I went to the dentist, who doesn't do credit or debit cards either.

So yesterday - a phone call and the dénouement - they turned out to both be 100% vulcanised rubber cheques from a “deactivated” book. Oh the embarrassment. But as I promised them both today never fear, the (new) cheques are in the post. And that's an excuse you also rarely hear in this day and age.