So near, yet so feared: No spray, Jose

Am I as vain as or less vain than that elusive figure "the next man"? Maybe a little less so, although the only reason I didn't become a professional cross-country skier (the single career open to Norwegian women in the late 1970s) was that I didn't want to be seen on television with frozen snot on my face.

But there's one thing in the female (and increasingly male) vanity department I cannot live without: hairspray.

The only hair options in Norway are: bald at 21 with ginger stubble, if you're male, or each strand an eighth of the thickness of other people's hair, if you're female. Combined with an egg-shaped head this creates a genetic disaster for me that can only be remedied with industrial-strength hairspray, and lots of it.

I long ago realised that hairspray has more than an undertone of the blue-rinse brigade about it but have learned to live with this fact, knowing my hair at least doesn't look like a damp rag. What I didn't know until 2008, though, was that hairspray also a deadly weapon, a taker down of empires and the greatest threat to sports events.

The Beijing Olympics were six weeks away. My friend R and I were on a train from Urumqi to Korla, in Xinjiang, on the edge of the Taklimakan Desert. We were having a beer party in our four-person cabin when the "show your passport" thing, which all people travelling in "soft sleeper" cars must endure, happened - something about keeping out the riff-raff out of the nice cabins.