A beautiful sunny evening and I am having a drink in the garden with friends. All is right with the world, apart from one thing — my head is itching horribly. Without thinking, I scratch behind my ear, then near the crown, before my fingers move to my neck — where I can feel a smattering of small bites. I don’t just want to scratch, I want to rake my nails across my scalp and draw blood. Feelings of well-being evaporate and my stomach lurches. I edge away from my unsuspecting friends. Daisy Goodwin has has problems with head lice since she was 19 and says she has suffered with them almost 100 times since then . It’s happened again. I have nits. I make my excuses and sneak inside to scrape my hair into a ponytail. I am desperate for my guests to leave so I can take out my nit lotion and special comb to get rid of the varmits. Through the bathroom window, I can see my teenage daughter laughing with a couple of friends, all of them shaking their glossy, waist-length hair. My eyes narrow, those flowing locks are the enemy — a breeding ground for the bane of my life: pediculus humanus capitis, or head lice (a nit is the egg sac laid by the female louse on the hair shaft of their human hosts). I have had nits at least 100 times. Never as a child, but as an adult it has been one infestation after another. I should stress I wash my hair pretty much every day and have no other body-borne parasites, such as fleas — but my scalp is El Dorado for lice. My first experience was at 19 when I was studying at Cambridge. I had just been home, visiting my two sisters who were still at primary school. A week later I was sitting in the university library opposite a boy I had a crush on. Our eyes met, he smiled, I grinned back then scratched my head. I heard something hit the paper I was taking notes on, and there on the page of white A4 was an object the size of an eyelash, with six wriggling legs. Dais (pictured as a child) says she was never affected by head lice when she was younger, only getting them for the first time when she was 19 . It was my first sighting of a live louse. I ran to the nearest chemist and doused my head with the industrial-strength chemicals that were then usual treatment for nits. I didn’t tell anyone, I was too embarrassed, but made sure the next time I saw my sisters I kept them at arm’s length. I don’t know if the boy in the library saw the nit fall from my head — in my memory it was the size of a small mouse — but somehow I never found myself sitting opposite him again. In retrospect, I think he may have been giving me a wide berth. After a few nit-free years in my early 20s, my relationship with the parasites resumed when I became a mother. It’s a rite of passage for most parents of primary school children. The note comes home with them in the homework folder, announcing that nits have been found in the class and would parents please check their children’s heads for the critters and treat them accordingly? Easier said than done, as nits are masters of disguise — it takes 20:20 vision or a very high-powered magnifying glass to spot a live one. It’s much easier to pinpoint the eggs, tell-tale white flecks that cling to the hair shaft. Daisy (pictured) was lucky to have a few nit-free years in her early twenties but didn't escape the parasites entirely as they returned when she had children . My eldest daughter began school in 1996, and a nit invasion swiftly followed. They leapt with enthusiasm from her head to mine, and back again — completely ignoring the head of my husband — leading me to spend a small fortune on louse-busting treatments. This sector of the pharmaceutical market is worth £185 million a year in the UK, and I know why. As those who have experienced it know, nit-combing is the closest most mums get to being a gorilla, grooming its offspring for fleas. When my daughters were young (they are now 24 and 14) I would regularly grab them by their lustrous locks and scrutinise their scalps for those tiny flecks. ‘Oh Mum,’ they would complain, ‘lay off, there’s nothing there.’ But I knew better. I had seen the scratching and I could feel the prickle on my own scalp. Their heads and mine were five-star hotels for head lice and no sooner had I eliminated one nit invasion, another would follow. Daisy (pictured as a child) says you can win the battle with headlice but you can never win the war . Nits are the Forth Bridge of infestations, no sooner have you spent a good half-day combing the hair of a wriggling eight-year-old, than you have to do it all over again, and again and again. I have tried everything, and I mean everything to get rid of them. Chemicals, suffocation, endless combing — there was even a point where I made my daughters put on hats when they came home from school so I wouldn’t get them. But there is no way to avoid them. The only thing I haven’t done is to shave their heads — or mine. You can win the battle against head lice with nit combs and conditioner and weekly combings, but you can never, ever win the war. Relax your vigilance for a millisecond and they are back. Christmas is peak time for nits in my experience — all that conviviality is party-time for the critters. Over the past ten years, I must have spent at least five festive mornings hovering over my daughters with a nit comb, squeaking with horror as I extract yet another fat troublesome specimen from their hair. Pretty much every foreign holiday I have taken in 15 years has involved one shaming incident where I have to mime the action of headlice in a foreign chemist’s shop — in Italy they are called pidocchi, in Germany, kopflause. What the Thai word for them is I do not know, but I do know that scratching your head in a Bangkok chemist will give you some pretty powerful stuff. I once missed a New Year’s Eve party in France because the local pharmacist told me to douse my head in olive oil overnight and then wash it off with Coca-Cola. Desperate for a solution, I followed her advice and ended up with hedgehog hair that took a week to return to normal. The worst experience was a holiday in Ireland with my best friend who has a head of expensively highlighted hair. After a week with me and my daughters, her head started to itch. The only remedy available in the pharmacy at Schull, Co Cork, was so pungent it turned her ash tints a dull green. We are still friends — just. I thought that when my second daughter left primary school four-and-a-half years ago my nit ordeal would end, but no — it appears head lice are just as virulent among teens as they are among younger children. My nephews and nieces have become resigned to their aunt doing a quick once over when they visit — if I could install the head lice equivalent of a sheep dip, believe me I would. Daisy (pictured) thought she was safe when her youngest daughter left primary school but it seems that headlice are just as virulent among teens as they are among younger children . When my daughters were young, I would quite often have a quick snoop over the scalps of their visiting friends just to check. Sadly, that isn’t an option with teenagers — peering at adolescent scalps is a human rights issue. Understandably, I have accumulated quite a bit of knowledge about nits in my near 30-year relationship with them. I have discovered, for example, that not many grown men seem to get them. Could that be a hormonal thing or is it because men don’t get down with the kids as much as women (nits can’t fly but they can jump downwards, so you never want to sit below a potentially nit-infested child). In New York, the louse-infested head straight to the nit pickers of Crown Heights — Hasidic Jews who comb every hair until they have eliminated them. Over here, there is a thriving service called The Hairforce, which will come to your house and de-infest the whole family. But it’s not cheap (close to £1,500 for a family of four, including two home visits) and if you get them as often as I do, you would be bankrupt. According to Richard J. Pollack, the only failsafe solution is to avoid all physical contact with other people as the nits can only jump a very short distance from head-to-head . My only comfort has been assuming that my attractiveness to head lice is something to do with having super-powerful feminine pheromones, which made me irresistible to both men and the pesky pediculus genus. Yet according to Richard J. Pollack, senior environmental public health officer at Harvard University, that is not the case. Head lice do not discriminate, he insists: ‘Scalp hair is a prerequisite. Being alive is another — they won’t infest corpses. Head lice only infest human beings.’ Pollack says regular infestation in adults is rare, happening in less than 1 per cent of cases. His website, identify.us.com, has all the latest research on nits. But even he can’t explain why I’m a nit magnet. The only failsafe solution, he says, is to avoid all physical contact with other people; nits can only jump a very short distance from head-to-head. Of course, now I have told the world about my nit problem, that might not be a problem!
Daisy Goodwin has had problems with head lice since she was 19 . She says she's suffered with the itchy parasites at least 100 times . A nit is the egg sac laid by female lice on human hair shafts .