NIT FAMILY TREFUSIS

Every morning, at about half four, The Tiniest Trefusis climbs into bed with Mr Trefusis and I. Still more than three-quarters asleep, she clambers between us, and welds herself to me, head pressed against mine, a hot arm thrown round my neck, icy feet jammed into my side. Her snuffling breath blows stertorously into my ear, keeping me awake, but I don’t mind. She’s my baby, my last child, and the more Trefusis Minor grows up from infant to boy, each passing week ushering in the wilful independence of six, rather than the boyish neediness of five, the more I cling to the fleeting babyhood of Tiny Trefusis.

So really, much against the better judgement of Mr Trefusis, I can’t quite bring myself to put her back in her own bed. We both crave the comfort of each other still, listening as the intense intimacy of mother and newborn baby echoes back at us over the intervening years. Every time she hops in it reminds me of those precious weeks after her birth, when we seemed to spend most of our time in bed together, she dozing at my breast, and me too awed by her fragile beauty to go to sleep. We’re both caught in the no man’s land of toddlerhood: she reserves the right to be simultaneously ‘a Big’ and a baby, and I can’t bear to discourage her.

However, now that she is on her way to being three, and has started Montessori, this physical proximity has its disadvantages. I waved her off on her first day, and not a week later, as I sat one afternoon at my desk, I started to feel a tell-tale prickling on my scalp, behind my ears, and near the nape of my neck. It quickly became more than a tickling irritation, and I found I could no longer suppress the urge to scratch and furtively shoved a plastic fork underneath my hair and wiggled it about, scraping about the roots as gently and subtly as I could.

Nits. The Tiniest Trefusis had given me nits.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

As the afternoon wore on, I could find no relief in a little light fork therapy: I locked myself in the ladies lavatory and gave into an ecstasy of scratching; scarlet fingernails whirling dervishes underneath my hair. Oh, the rapture. The elation of being able to sate the insane itching. I emerged to look at myself in the mirror. Any vestige of a once elegant coiffure excised by the beserker action of my fingers, I looked as if I’d had a particularly enthusiastic run-in with a live cable.

The relief was short-lived. As I travelled home on the bus, I had to sit on my hands to stop them going to my hair. To keep myself sane, I focused on the image of the rather ancient nit comb rusting at the bottom of the medicine chest in the bathroom.

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.

I gathered the Trefusii together, larded them with the only conditioner I could find – an extremely expensive Kerastase hair masque, rather too fit for purpose, and ignoring their screams as I pulled heartlessly through tangles - Mr Trefusis the loudest of the protestors, naturally – I de-nitted them. Astonishingly, Trefusis Minor and Mr Trefusis were entirely nit free and in a fit of pique I threatened to send them down the road to the Glaxo Smith Kline laboratory to see if they had any special immunity that could be bottled and patented as an expensive anti-nit vaccine. It could make us rich beyond our wildest dreams - I’d pay, wouldn’t you?

The Tiniest Trefusis had six proper nits. Nits so big, you could give them their own sideshow in a flea circus, and they didn’t appear to bother her remotely – not a surreptitious scratch or poke into her still downy baby hair. I started on my own. I’m secretly immensely pleased with my hair – it’s very long, and very thick, and the greatest treat I can think of is a visit to Graham the Hair God for a re-blonding, or a blow-dry or for one of his more elaborate confections should I have something exciting to go to. It’s a devil to get a nit comb through, though. I think it took me a full thirty minutes to comb the Kerastase through the lot. And if I wasn’t as badly affected as The Tiny T, the little buggers were certainly in there. On the upside, of course, we're the shiniest-haired family in Shepherds Bush.

Of course, the problem with treating nits is that you have to keep it up – one session with the nit comb and the conditioner isn’t enough: I’ve been taking the family through the nit ritual daily, and in the case of La Princesse Pou, twice – once with conditioner and once with a special evil battery operated comb which is supposed to condemn the nits to death by electrocution. I’ve developed a whole range of severe, scraped back Let-Me-Be-Your-Stern-Mistress hairdos – the nit comb conditioner trick takes so long in the morning I don’t have the time left to blow dry it, and I’m pretty keen to keep my hair up and out of everyone’s way until I have the nit all-clear, particularly given the amount of air-kissing that's obligatory in my line of work. It also means I can poke hair pins at the itchy bits mid afternoon, on the pretext of tidying my 'do'.

I’m very over all this – how long do I have to keep doing it? Do you have nits? Any cunning ways for getting rid of them that I don’t know about, short of making the Tiniest Trefusis wear a bedcap so she doesn’t keep on sharing her nits with me at night?

Scratch. Scritch. Scratch. Scratch. Scritch-scritch. Scratch.