On hairlines

I am pretty lucky in the hair department. Any number of my fellow men would like to have as much hair as I do. It is thick, too. And a colour which I have heard described to me as "intellectual blond".

I have a bald spot on the top of my head, which is caused by scar tissue from where I split my head open five years ago and the incompetent buffoon doctors at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead left a piece of gauze in. When I finally removed it, after two weeks of things unsurprisingly enough not healing properly, it was an item which could have been used in public health advertisments to discourage anyone from doing absolutely anything. Needless to say, it was grotesque: saturated with blood, pus and plasma from where my skin had tried to establish a medium to regrow skin.

It's this unsightly dent which makes me very self-conscious about the scourge of men everywhere: male pattern baldness. This isn't vanity about hairlessness, but the shame and embarrassment of a revolting reminder of the stupidest thing I ever did being visible to the world. I am sure I could cope with the former. The latter would probably drive me to go and live in a cave and subsist on a diet of foraged roots and berries.

Baldness isn't actually too much of a concern for me in terms of genetics. For countless generations on either side of my family there are impressively hirsute men, even into their dotage. So, it was the cause of some disquiet when my brother asked me last Friday afternoon if my hairline was receding. In the galling way that these things do, someone put a very similar question to me out of the blue on Saturday evening.

It's a pretty silly question to ask. How should I know? If I am it's at such a glacial level that I shouldn't risk showing the world my cratered head until I'm at least 175-years old. The only solution to this problem is to approach it in the same way parents approach the issue of the growth of their children. The time has come for men everywhere to get the leading edge of their hairline tattooed as a thin black line once a year. This will answer all questions that anyone may have, as long as people remember to carry a ruler with them at all times.