IT HAS long been a useful maxim that, as a general guide to right-thinking, one should do and say the opposite of the Daily Mail — welcome shell-shocked Afghan plumbers with open arms, pray for a gay son to take care of you in your old age and sell yourself for more than 45p a day — but this week’s snide comments about Kate Winslet’s new hair are, even by the Mail’s standards, like watching a clown inflate a giant balloon with “I Am Wrong” written on it. Winslet has gone ginger.

The Mail does not like that. It’s treating her change of hair colour as an act of self-vandalism on a par with having an ugly face tattooed over your own, or Leslie Ash’s unfortunate session with the bicycle pump and her mouth.

Being ginger, like being poor and having one leg, is not something that anyone would impose on themselves. To be ginger is to be blighted. To be ginger is to be a minger.

How can the world have got this wrong without falling out of the universe like a brick? How could ginger hair be seen as anything other than the most glorious hair there can be? It is burnished, for the love of God — the colour of fire and sunsets and marmalade; of amber and rooster feathers, and New England in September. I can’t understand anyone who would covet a pair of red velvet shoes but not want a red velvet head.

Ninety-eight per cent of the entire matter of the world is browny-blackish, with a bilious overtone of yellow: coats and dirt and dogs and tights and pavements. Who would then choose to colour their hair to blend in with old wet concrete, and puddles? Gingers, meanwhile, are wandering around with gold heads. With the sun, if not shining out of their bottoms, then shining out of their skulls. They have the instant holy aura of 6th-century diptychs – they are wearing crowns when most of us look as if we are wearing a small brown flat-cap that we found in a hedge. I couldn’t think of a more obvious claim to superiority if I were using a big ginger abacus.

Of course, I was born to be biased – my nan and my two strongest sisters had hair the colour of violin rosin, and they were the only ones who could reduce my dad, who otherwise has the personality of a martinet with a Surreal Random Rage button, to a battered ghost. His mantra of defeat was a whimpered: “You ginger bastards. You ginger, copper-nob bastards.” Under their brisk cultural thumb, the brunettes (“Poo-hairs”) in the house were raised on Marmalade Atkins – feral, ginger punk-child eats cake for breakfast; Annie – ebullient ginger bags millionaire before puberty; Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly — ginger diva does exactly as she pleases in a variety of awesome frocks; and Anne of Green Gables – ginger who admittedly marries someone called Gilbert, but not before she rides a cow down the high street. Happily brain and hair-washed, with the first money I ever earned at 16, I bought a pot of Krazy Kolour in Poppy Red and dyed my hair the colour of zinfandel.

By then Caro was in her teens, too, and doing a quick stint of National Service rebellion, and so between 1995 and 2000 when we met up between hairdressing appointments, she was a brunette with ginger roots, and I was a ginger with brunette roots. We would have made a perfect modern Bible illustration called “Do Not Covet Thy Neighbour’s Ass”.

These days, the only outward sign of my ginger roots is a solitary highlight in Rose Red on the left side of my head — which once made a man apologise unnecessarily for his child having spilt poster-paint on me — but I am even more militant in my veneration of the Gold Headed people. Happily, most people’s objection to gingers is the single, inexplicable shudder “but think of the pubes”, which allows me to point out that, with a ginger there is at least no danger of mistaking lulu-beard for a black rat, as one of Spike Milligan’s virgin friends did with a brunette; and running from the room screaming for help.

If people then persist in being blithering idiots, I briskly inform them that they are little better than medieval peasants, who feared the ginger lady under the belief that she had a full set of teeth up her lulu, and would bite a man’s pizzle off as soon as look at it. And really, when you think about that myth, you have to admire the ginger ladies even more — what better way to avoid being pawed by every mud-smeared village idiot than spreading the rumour you have bitey knickers? The blondes would never have come up with that one. However, it was when Damian Lewis appeared as Soames in The Forsyte Saga that I felt as if the conclusion of my campaign was drawing near. Lewis was undeniably the finest piece of hot, oozing honey on the comb — to the point where most female viewers of The Forsyte Saga had wholly incorrect responses to his raping of Irene — that his gingerness, by association, became desirable.

After writing a column of rigorously objective drool proclaiming him the Ginger Sex Messiah, I received 32 letters of varying lustful shame, all admitting that Lewis was the first ginger they had ever fancied, and was it so wrong, after all, to want to lick his cidercoloured eyebrows until they were drunk? No. How could it be wrong? Botticelli painted Venus as a redhead. It is only right that ITV should find an Adonis to match.

RED ALERT

The ginger gene comes from Neanderthals. Well, you know. Cool.

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