Hair loss editorial
Heads you loseBy Jonathan Moules
“Baldy! Slaphead! Spam!” How we laughed at those chrome-domed adults when we were mop-headed teenagers.
Kids can be cruel. Pulling up our thick fringes and smacking our palms against our bare foreheads whenever a man with a receding hairline passed us in the street seemed so funny at the time.
The leader of one local youth group, who from recollection appeared to have lost his hair at a disconcertingly early age, was nicknamed Grandad.
Mr Porter, a French teacher at my school who had the misfortune of having a puny frame as well as a smooth head, was once pinned to the wall by a gang of boys in the top year and had the word “Spam” scrawled in Biro across his head.
But fate is a fickle creature and retribution sometimes comes to those that mock.
I had not even got to the end of my twenties when, standing in one of those restaurant toilets where the mirrors face one another, I first noticed the thinning at the back of my head.
At first I would try to ignore it, hoping that it was a trick of the light. This delusion was shattered when I happened to comment to a female friend about an acquaintance who was losing his locks. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she shot back.
Hair loss is one of society’s last legitimate targets for ridicule and prejudice, alongside being ginger. You cannot help but feel sorry for Neil Kinnock.
Part of the problem is a lack of solidarity among the hairless. Elton John might be proud to be gay, but he has spent untold amounts of money having his thinning crown replanted because of the shame of a hairless head.
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