I’ve had hundreds of passionate replies before on my blog or updates on Facebook, concerning international Peace Intention Experiments, revolutionary discoveries about the nature of our world, radical new ways to restructure our society, or even contentious issues about the state of modern medicine, but nothing has generated more response than when I announced to the world, via a new photo, that I’d stopped dyeing my hair.

Almost everyone to a man and woman liked the new image more than my dyed former self, but they also liked what it represented. Many saw it as an expression of power, a rebellion against the straitjacket of our current conception of beauty with its tyranny of youthful appearance at all costs.

I had not really thought of it as an act of defiance or me a poster girl for women of a certain age.

I did it because I want to live long enough to be around for grandchildren. I did it because I don’t want to die as my mother did, of a slow and painful cancer.