FEAR OF A BALD PLANET

RULE 1: YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR HAIR

I must admit I’ve got a confession to make.

All of this is a confession of a sort. Every word everyone ever writes is a confession – they may try and disguise it. They may make allegories, they may tell blatant, outright lies, but even the lies they tell, the stories they tell, everything they say, reveals something.

But you won’t get any of that today. Here is my confession: my straight up Father, I have sinned, atheist admission to a God that doesn’t exist. Most people want to avoid being bald. Most people fight against it with every bone in their body. And there’s no shame in it. Francis Rossi from Status Quo even advertises his hair-weaving firm in their brochures. And I wasn’t ashamed of going bald.

Secretly, I wanted it. I craved it: and I even had a name for my affliction. It had a name, rarely spoken, and even less understood.

Alopecia. Male pattern baldness. At least, that’s what I thought it was, until someone pointed out that Alopecia is the stage where someone has no hair at all. I told you it was even less understood. If I was a Labour spindoctor, I’d tell you that Alopecia wasn’t an affliction, but an opportunity: never having to shave, no tagnuts, no dangleberries - for example.

No hair at all. Some people think having a bit of a thinning patch up top is bad. They don’t even know they’re born. But baldness? For most people it’s shadowy appearance in our hairlines is the first knock at the door by the Grim Reaper. It’s all downhill from here. First your hair, then your waist, then your sex drive. And finally, your dignity. It’s all in decline from here; last stop: death. So not something one should be pleased about.

But I ran towards it. Other men do everything within their power to avoid it: they wear wigs. They have weaves. Implants. They have surgeons cut out the skin on the back on their heads where the hair has migrated like an old, habitual bird in the Winter, and graft onto the front of their heads in some bizarre Frankenstein experiment. So they look as if they still have these elusive strands.

This stubborn Keratin. The nemesis: the Kryptonite.

RULE 2 : YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR HAIR

But, when baldness called, I didn’t shy away: I sped. I returned its text messages like a teenager, I waited impatiently for it on Saturday Nights like an infatuated adolescent, I waited for the sticky fumblings of thinning hair with the frantic heart of the lovestruck.

I know. It’s weird. Wrong. Sick and perverted. It goes against the laws of nature, and certainly against the laws of the hairline.

You see, I had a problem. It’s not terminal, but it was certainly serious. I carried this problem, this affliction everywhere. I long thought myself incurable - and I couldn’t hide it or disguise it. No matter how I tried, it was always there.

But why was I so glad for the onset of my thinning hair? Why was it a cause for celebration? What was my Achilles Heel that made a head free of hair so attractive?

So here I come clean: no matter what I did my hair always looked shit.

Hairstyles were meant to be bad when you were growing up : that was the point of them. You try, you experiment, you find what works – or doesn’t – and you cringe at the pictures later on. You know, your children laugh at the hairstyle you had and the clothes you wore (Daddy, what did you do in the fashion wars?), before they realise that they’ll look back at their own photographs in two decades and they’ll also cringe.

At least that’s my excuse for having bad clothes and bad hair, and I’m sticking to it.

Self-awareness is a terrible burden to carry. And so, even when I carried it for years, I knew my hair was shit. It did things I didn’t want it to, like a disobedient child. It staunchly refused to co-operate. Whatever I wanted it to, it couldn’t. When I wanted it to lie flat, it stood to attention like an unwanted erection. When I wanted it to look spiky and cool, all it wanted to do is to lay down floppily on my head like Hugh Grant’s impotent hairpiece.

There wasn’t anything I didn’t try. Gels. Waxes. Water. Combs even. Everything bar dyeing it and shaving it all off. I tired growing it. Cutting it. Shaping it. Anything. If it had been thought of… been there, done it, auctioned the T-Shirt on Ebay.

So when I saw the first signs of thinning, the first sign of recession, the first sign of the global warming afflicting my cranium, I almost embraced the environmental disaster. At last, I mentally cried, no more awful haircuts; no more hair.

But it was what I wanted. I wanted to be exposed. I wanted to be ‘papped’. I wanted to just come out of the closet and admit it in a tabloid expose.

RULE 3 : IF ITS YOUR FIRST NIGHT, YOU HAVE TO SHAVE

I threw caution and breakfast to the winds. Hair. Pshew! What an outdated concept. Hair was so passe. Live your life, be free, as the advert said. And so, one day, I sat – well, crouched – in front of the bathroom sink with my new pair of £17.95 Hair Clippers. With Free VHS “Cut Hair At Home” Easikit. From Argos.

I was always, always, a classy bastard. I didn’t even think of going to Littlewoods for this. Straight to Argos for moi.

And I shaved my head. I’d seen Taxi Driver. I knew I was going into battle: and so, as I always did when I shaved my head, as I always have done whenever I shave my head I did it differently to everyone else.

I gave myself a Mohawk. For about twenty minutes. I felt THAT hard I did. No one would mess with me. No-One. I was the Terminator. I could not be bought off, or reasoned with. I would not stop. Ever. Until I got bored. Or something.

The novelty of the Mohawk – like that of a goateed man who gives himself a Village People handlebar moustache (always, always, just to see what it looks like, of course) - soon wore off: as soon as I realised I might have to leave the house in the duration of its existence.

And hair was everywhere. Not like, most places. I mean everywhere. I mean, under my fingernails. In my nose. Under my foreskin. And I hadn’t even taken my underwear off all day. But that’s another tragic story – my life is one long tragic story. Maybe I’m a drama queen. Or a spoilt middle class brat who doesn’t know what side his bread’s buttered actually. I’m uncertain.

But I’d finished. I’d shaved my head. No matter how bad it looked now, I was months away from escaping it. No parole from the bald pate.

RULE 4 : NO WIGS, CODPIECES, EXTENSIONS OR GRAFTS

No Hair means No Bad Hair Days. And isn’t that a beautiful idea? Every cloud has a platinum Visa card lining. There were advantages: I could wake up in the morning and not worry about what my hair looked like; because it always looked the same. I never had to wash it except when I shaved my head every 21 days. I saved a fortune on hairdressers. Even my stunted mental arithmetic tells me that I saved somewhere in the region of £200 on even the most haircuts up until the end of the last year. That’s quite a few takeaway pizzas. (And it shows to be honest).

Nobody started fights with me. Which was nice. Used to be nobody did because they thought I was some floppy haired weak git. Now they thought I was a streamlined, softly spoken English killing machine. Finely trained in the ancient Italian art of Pizza and Lasagne. Which kills, of a sort, through a discrete combination of cheese and calories.

Even my boss at the time was initially scared of me. Which was nice. Because he was a bullying gonad with no redeeming features whatsoever. He wouldn’t even quit when I wanted him to. Or when anyone else in the office wanted him to. How selfish.

Anyway, life as a bald man did have it’s advantages. Important stuff like worrying about having a hair out of place ceased to be a concern. As did shampoo, cleanser, wax, gels, and all the other stuff that takes up literally one or two pages in American Psycho. All gone. My mind was free now. I was able to detect the creative impulses clearly with my mental aerial now that my follicles weren’t blocking the signal.

Anyway, for me, shaving my head was an important mental ritual. I shaved my head at another important juncture in my life: I’d just come out of a seven year relationship. Sure, like any relationship it had its up and its down. But recently, it had had more downs than anything else. Nothing to do with either of us. If we were in a band, it would be called musical differences. But more accurately, we wanted different things. She wanted me to be someone I wasn’t. I wanted to be someone she didn’t want me to be.

But lets not point the finger. That’s a subplot. Or at the very least a weekly column in a broadsheet.

So after four years of shaving my head, it got a bit boring. There comes a time in a mans life when he needs to rethink his whole being; Who he is, what he wears, what he looks like. And who he is has got to reflect who he feels himself to be. Or something.

RULE 5 : ONE SHAVE AT A TIME FELLAS....

Hell, if I didn’t change my style and appearance every once in a while I’d still look like Kurt Cobain, with long straggly hair, threadbare jeans, and grey t-shirts bearing the name of the-band-I-used-to-be-in’s 1992 World Tour of Birmingham.

And I just got bored of being bald. I wanted to be someone different, someone with hair. And better clothes. I auctioned all the old T-Shirts on Ebay. Almost paid for the divorce with it as well.

And you know what. I like it. It’s not better or worse. But it’s me. I used to be someone with a shaved head: that’s who I was. Now I’m someone with hair: that’s who I am. I’m still standing, yeah yeah yeah. And despite what you might think, that’s not so bad.

So I conquered my fear of my Trichologist. I don’t think there is a medical term for my previous condition: my embracement of baldness. I know what I look like with a shaved head. And with hair? Much the same. But I have faced my fear: what doesn’t shave you makes you stronger.

I think.