Losing It

Oh My God! I am going bald! Now I know I shouldn't react like that. After all I can think immediately of four close friends who are bald. They have all done so gracefully and none of them have resorted to any of the disastrous coping strategies that can afflict The Bald Man. I refer of course to those transplants that look as though they were performed with a spudgun. The weaves that bring back of the lost art of thatching. The sprays that look like decorative snow-in-a-can, past it's sell-by date and discoloured with age or the dreaded comb over. It goes with out saying that none of them posses a wig for anything but formal occasions. But I have good reason.

First let me explain how I noticed it. I was in the chair at work having the old Barnet done by Paul our hairdresser. I may have mentioned I am playing tough, authoritative Police Commissioner Kyle Kilpatrick in my latest job here in Toronto so I went for something quite butch. A jaunty upthrust to the hair which requires no little coaxing on Paul's part. Liberal use of an industrial paste and the blow dryer set to 'Windtunnel'. Though I cut quite a dash during filming, after a day under the lights, I am looking more like Dennis the Menace or Oor Wullie than the head of Boston's finest.

Once back in the apartment I went to the bathroom to freshen up before hitting Toronto's night spots when I noticed it. At first I put it down to this terrible modern habit of fitting out bathrooms with between six to eight overhead motorcar headlights. But my pate has withstood that kind of scrutiny in the past. Here now my dome was revealed in all it's horror. The thinning hair on the front of my scalp disappearing under the nuclear glare of the Halogen lamps and my hairline being reminiscent of nothing so much as a contemporary portrait of the ageing Queen Elizabeth the First. Trust me to have 'Seventeenth-Century-Royal Female Pattern Balding".

So why am I so concerned given my own friends' easy transition from hirsute to sute? I will tell you. Rick's head is smooth and sensuous. Ian's is like an attractively bronzed egg. Malcolm's wrinkles like waves on a millpond when he laughs and David's makes him look like he has two brains, which is ironic if you know David. In short their skulls suit follicular nudity.

I am afraid mine does not. How do I know this? I will tell you. For my last performance at Drama School I was entrusted with the role of Sir John Falstaff in Henry the V parts one and two and as a skinny nineteen year old I needed all the help I could get. So in an attack of method acting which thankfully has never flared up since... I shaved my head. The job done, I looked in the mirror and the razor fell from my lifeless fingers. I lifted a shaking hand to my blood-speckled head and ran my palm over the offending contours.

In that moment it all became clear that in my desperate desire to leave childhood, the infant me had gritted his teeth and put on a spurt of growth that had slammed my fontanelle shut with such force that, like a mountain range rising between converging tectonic plates a bony ridge had thrust itself skyward from my cranium, giving me the look of the last remaining specimen of Homo Stegosaurus on the planet.

In the millennia to come, when they excavate that part of the seabed which was once Chiswick and they uncover my perfectly fossilised skeleton, uniquely preserved in a bizarre septic tank accident, they will look upon me and say...

"Rewrite the history books. Spielberg was right. Man and Dinosaur truely did co-exist."

I need a good Trichologist and I need him now.