I WAS a bit shocked when I spotted my first grey hair.

I saw it in the rear-view mirror of my car, and at first thought it had come from my friend’s dog, a shaggy mongrel who left half his coat on your clothing after being petted.

But when I tried to brush it off, it stayed, and I realised with horror that it was embedded in my scalp. I plucked it out and scrutinised it in disbelief.

That was more than a decade ago, and since then I’ve sprouted a few more, but so far they’re not too noticeable among the millions of red ones.

If I was shocked aged 40, it must be really alarming to find grey hairs poking through when you’re half that age. Yet more and more women – almost a third – are losing their natural colouring and going grey aged under 30. Most of them blame it on stress.

It’s puzzling as to why we become so fraught at the thought of going grey. It’s not that bad a colour – a silvery mane can look more striking than a mousy one – but once it starts to get a foothold, we race to the chemist’s for bottles of dye. We are conditioned, if you pardon the pun, to dislike grey hair, associating it with old age and seeing it as generally unattractive.

But grey can look great – Lady Gaga looked striking on the cover of Vanity Fair with long grey hair.

And according to the Bible (I gleaned this from Google, not bedtime reading), grey hair is a “crown of splendour”, although it also adds that it can be attained by living a godly life. That explains why my greyness is slow in coming.

Men don’t seem to be as bothered by going grey as they were in my youth – I remember those awful adverts for men’s hair dye, featuring swarthy-looking men with hair the most unnatural shade of deep jet. Grey hair is surely preferable.

Philip Schofield, who got his first grey hair aged 16, but dyed it brown until he hit 40, now thinks this was a mistake, and he should have left it alone.

I blame my first grey hairs on the house next door. Not our current neighbours, who are great, but a rowdy student house next door, which sent my stress levels soaring.

Subsequent grey hairs are courtesy of my daughters, who are so completely obsessed with their own hair that they wouldn’t notice if I went grey overnight – and with the explosive rows I have with my eldest daughter, that may very well happen.