This is odd. I look incredibly well. I’ve had a haircut, one of the things the leaflet advises before chemotherapy, because shorter hair hangs in there longer apparently. Sarah, who has been through this with her mother, cuts my hair in her flat, a kindness to me, in case it all gets emotional. Sarah’s brilliant, sharp scissors make new angles appear. I skip down the stairs from her flat - this illness can’t catch me...eee...ee...

I’m cycling everywhere, my son perched on the child-seat, a hard-core believer that you can negotiate physical ordeals - like the chemotherapy starting next week - by getting fit. It is how I dealt with pregnancy and childbirth - keep moving, beat the fatigue.

So I look great - fresh skin, short, swingy haircut. People in my neighbourhood have started to hear about the cancer. And this is the strange bit. Am I supposed to be ill in bed? People look startled when they see me. I feel like “the cancer victim who is out and about”. Acquaintances, whispering instead of talking normally, ask (a very drawn-looking) Anthony how I am.

But there is one living room where there are no sideways glances, no sotto voce mutters, where everything life throws out is dealt with directly and openly. No secrets here, and no taboos either. My friend Elly takes me round to Hendon’s best “shaitel lady” - a local woman who sells wigs from her home.

In my Orthodox Jewish community, many of the married women cover their hair for religious reasons, supporting a mini-industry in wigs. In fact, I’m the only one of my parents’ four daughters whose hair shows. As it happens, the first time I married, I did cover my hair for a while, mostly with berets and scarves.

Back then, I worked on the features desk of the just-founded newspaper, the Independent, and my boss had lost her hair to alopecia. One day we both came in wearing berets, and Marie Helvin, who was writing a piece, turned up sporting a beret too. The various male section heads who often sauntered past when Helvin appeared, came over to comment: “Ahh, the new fashion then, berets.” Shortly after that I chucked all head-coverings into the bin.

So this illness, with its cure that attacks hair, has connotations for me way beyond the medical. There is also the fact that Ashkenazi Jewish women - like myself - can carry two genes that cause breast cancer: BRCA1 and BRCA2. It is bizarre to me that these genes are named as they are, because the abbreviation sounds like “bracha” - Hebrew for blessing. I think of them as bracha one, and bracha two, and any day now I’m going to find out where the blessing lies.

It’s pouring rain the night I go for my wig-fitting. A young woman opens the door. To the right is a room filled with hairpieces, bright lights, a big mirror and a large swivel chair. Though both cover their hair, neither of the women in charge wears a wig; one is in a snood, the other a kerchief.

The wigs on display are not ready-styled. There are bins full of hanks of, mainly dark, human hair, which has been hand-sewn onto netting - laborious work, done by women in other countries, before the wigs are sent to the west. So human hair wigs, as different from the synthetic kind as Harold Pinter is from reality TV, are expensive, well over £1,000. But for that, you get a wig with a parting that can be brushed through and moved, that doesn’t lie rigidly in one artificial line, and is cut to your shape. A friend, in hospital with leukaemia, wears one of these wigs, and the cancer ward staff are stunned by its realism.

The women here are very kind, and very straightforward. They spend a long time matching hair colour, giving advice, getting it right. During the evening many other women come in, wigs looking wrong on their heads, then the shaitel lady tweaks, cuts, styles and they leave, uber-chic.

A soon-to-be bride is fretting, and hours, literally, are spent perfectly matching her complexion. But there is an air of sadness here too - a passing on of a burden, this wig-wearing. Or that’s what I feel, anyhow.

The ultimate wig is found for me, minute comparisons of grades of chestnut colouring made. These women are patient as time. But no surprise either, that back in Elly’s car, the burden of meaning that covering hair has for me suddenly overwhelms, and I sit, again, dissolved in tears, Elly silent and sympathetic, head in her hands.

• This column appears fortnightly.

• 18 March 2021: this article has been edited to remove some personal information.