Louis: on a learning curve

Last week was one of the hardest of my hairdressing days so far. Most of my friends are still at college; so they've broken up for the summer holidays. They've got six weeks of chilling out and doing nothing all day ahead of them. I, on the other hand, have to go to work! I've chatted with a few of them in my lunch break and they're full of 'oh, we went swimming this morning' or 'we're off to the pictures this afternoon' and it is hard not to get a little bit jealous. The good thing is that I really love what I do and I have to remind myself of that. When I take a step back and think 'yes, but I enjoy it and I am getting a career' it doesn't bother me so much.

Working does make a difference to you as a person, though. I've noticed that I have matured a bit more than a lot of my friends. It is fun to mess about sometimes, but I feel a bit more grown up than some of them now.Not sure they'd agree with that in the salon though. I have a very childish sense of humour, I'm quite giggly and I am always doing silly things, so I am definitely the baby of the group!Like many people, the flooding had a bit of an impact on my life this week. Nothing major, but it did mean that I couldn't have my monthly training at the Pangbourne salon, because it had been flooded. Instead I did a cut and colour in the salon. As it wasn't planned, I had to find someone to be my model at the last minute - I convinced one of my friends to go for it; so I've already learned the importance of a good contacts book!I was really pleased with the actual cut and colour and I was left pretty much to my own devices, with someone watching from the sidelines to check that I didn't do anything horribly wrong.'My client' and I had a bit of a chat and we went for a '665', which is darker than her usual colour. It looked really nice, but she had a panel at the side that was slightly lighter so it was a bit more porous and didn't take so well. I now know that next time I find myself in that situation I would have either going for a permanent colour on that streak or gone a bit richer with the overall colour to compensate. At the moment, it's all a bit of a learning curve...