No not the opera, not many Spanish girls of that name, but the best birthday present ever when I was 17, in 1970. My parents had friends who I now realise were doing their utmost to treat me as a grown up rather than the sweet little girl that my parents made me out to be.

The first inkling i had of this wehn on my seventeenth birthday they presented me with a huge box and inside was a set of Carmen rollers. You have to be of a certain generation I think to remember what these were, but they were remarkably easy to use , and my hitherto fine and straggly hair could now be urged into some shape and possibly style.

I was thrilled to receive them and spent many a happy hour heating them up and twisting the aforementioned rats tails round them – waiting for them to cool down on my head, tearing them out and trying to retain some semblance of curl or wave.

I have to admit, I wasn’t very good at it, but over the years my hairstyling skills improved slightly, and hairsprays also became part of my repertoire, and so I soldiered on.

The last time I actually remember using the set was for my mother’s seventieth birthday 1n 1999. Last century! I had orange hair at the time, still an unruly mess, much to my mother’s general chagrin ( she was always a shampoo and set once a week kind of gal) so I thought I had better make the effort. By then the heating element was not so hot, but I managed.

But now I am almost seventy myself, my hair is still a mess, and I began to wonder, just wonder, if I dare use the rollers again. I am fully grown up now, I suppose, but the question is, are they safe? Is it worth finding out? What do people use nowadays, I wonder?

I hate going to the hairdresser and I have no patience with hairdryers, so this machine was a sort of miracle made in heaven, all those years ago.

By the way, the next time this particular couple, Wojtek and Ewa Janaszewcy, – he was the legal attaché to the Polish consulate in London in the sixties, she was a kidney surgeon, – made me feel like an adult was my next birthday, my eighteenth, when they gave me a Rolling Stones Record – High Tide and Green Grass. I really felt my years then, especially as it was the second copy of the same LP that I had received on that occasion. My aunt and uncle also thought I deserved entry into the adult world. After all I was in the first cohort of 18 year olds who could vote!