How to go bald... without losing it!
MODERN LIFE BALD by Stuart Heritage (Profile £12.99, 192pp)
ALL MEN are obsessed with going bald. Whether you’re thinning or receding or you have a full head of lustrous hair, you will be thinking about its imminent departure several times a day, if not constantly.
As one bald friend told me, the one good thing about going bald is that you stop worrying about whether or not you are going to go bald.
I should probably mention here that I am beginning to go a bit thin on top which, given that I am 63, isn’t bad going.
My brother, who is positively coot-like these days, noticed this and told me recently that if I continue to lose hair at the same rate, I’ll be as bald as he is when I’m 120.
‘I’ll take that,’ I said.
Stuart Heritage will admit to having been palpably bald for only two years, but it’s clear (from his descriptions, not from photos) that his hair has been heading for the fire exit for a number of years.
But it’s two years since he stopped trying to grow it back with Regaine and then comb what’s left over the growing bald patch like an unravelled Shredded Wheat.
He has, in short, come out of the baldness closet and embraced his baldie present and future.
As he asks on the back of this brutally funny little book, ‘Can a man go bald with dignity? Maybe.
‘But can a man go bald with more dignity than Stuart Heritage? Oh good God, yes, and this book is his attempt to make that happen for you.’
But to be fair, the book starts as an extended rant, or ‘tantrum’ as he prefers to put it.
Stuart is neither stoical nor accepting of his baldness, and his entire book ignores the crucial fact that Sir Patrick Stewart was voted Sexiest Man on TV in a TV Guide magazine readers’ poll in 1992 in the U.S. — despite resembling nothing more than a giant egg.
Stuart’s baldness has coincided (as many men’s does) with the onset of middle age, and although he has a lovely wife and children, he objects to becoming invisible to all women, as happens to all of us whether we have hair or not.
Stuart, by his own admission, doesn’t appear to have been like the average young person, and was never asked when buying booze in a supermarket whether he was over 18, a regular rite of passage for the rest of us.
He read somewhere that Christopher Walken credited his thick hair to a daily regimen of tugging hard at it, so Stuart did this, too.
It didn’t help. If anything it only helped it fall out more quickly.
This early part of the book is an extended cry for help, and is, at times, breathtakingly funny.
Gradually, and painfully, Stuart comes to terms with his baldness. He realises that his father, bald for as long as he can remember, couldn’t care less that he has no hair, and Stuart admires him unreservedly for this.
One chapter is called ‘ My bald heroes’, and includes such notables as Stanley Tucci, Dwayne ‘the Rock’ Johnson and Thanos from Marvel’s Avenger films. (What, no Patrick Stewart? Or even William Shatner?)
FINALLY, he tries to talk to the ‘one man, one glorious, solitary man alone in the universe, who has basically transformed himself into the functioning concept of baldness — and it’s not Hollywood star Jason Statham.
‘This man is responsible for more profound insights about baldness than all men before him combined …
‘If I could just get to this man, if I could somehow claw a speck of validation from him, then I might finally be able to accept my new place in the world’.
The man is larry David, cocreator of Seinfeld and star of Curb your Enthusiasm, and quite amazingly David agrees to speak to Stuart, as long as it is purely about baldness.
Stuart asks him if he could let people with hair know anything about the bald experience, what would it be?
‘It’s not as bad as you think it is,’ says larry, sagely.
And what does he enjoy about being bald?
‘It’s a woman rubbing my head. yeah. yeah. A nice woman with a nice affectionate rub of your head. yeah. That feels good.’
(I have since confirmed the truth of this with several follicly challenged friends of mine.)
There are some interesting byways, including a chapter on wearing hats. Stuart is very stern on this, working on the assumption that anyone who is wearing a hat is bald, and that if you aren’t, you’re essentially cheating.
Hats are only for the likes of him. ‘Too cold? Hat. Worried about sunburn? Hat. Fear of the several dozen cobwebs you definitely drag your head through every single day? Hat.’
He goes further. ‘A hatless day for us is like a blindfolded stroll though a minefield.’
It’s strange that in this chapter there is no mention of The Edge of U2 fame, who has clearly been bald for decades and is said to wear his beanie hat at all times of day and night.
Heritage’s book is short but brilliant, and as funny as anything you’ll read all year.
And that applies whether you are losing your hair, or whether you’re merely terrified of losing your hair, and counting every hair that falls out in the bath …