The Telegraph: Would politicians rather be thought vain than bald?

I’ve reached the far side of baldness. All that’s left is to ruthlessly shear off the remaining tufts that sprinkle the top of my cranium like a parched croquet lawn. The Mitchell brothers on EastEnders pioneered that tough-guy approach – all over with a Number 1.

The process of male-pattern baldness is slow and incremental. You don’t really notice it happening. There are stages, though, and the other day I reached a new one. After years when my mental picture of what I looked like has been pretty much unchanged, this was a surprise. I’ve long thought of myself as a “Jack Nicholson”: with a receding, but parabola-shaped, hairline. But washing my hair after a visit to the barber I realised that I wasn’t so much washing my hair as washing my head. The forehead went on forever. I’d reached the “Prince Edward” stage, ie, nearly smooth pate, hedge round the sides.

Oh well, I thought, I’m middle-aged now. That’s what it means: I am no longer young. Then again, I’m not a celebrity, so I don’t feel the pressure to take enormous trouble concealing evidence of the passing years. People in the public eye seem to be more anxious than ever about baldness. A luxuriant thatch signifies youth and vitality. (Whatever happened to qualities such as wisdom and experience?)

Think of David Cameron, whose barber, Lino Carbosiero MBE, is said to have designed an elaborate “comb-back” (a variation of the Bobby Charlton comb-over) to cover up a bald spot; and George Osborne, whose new high-browed fringe looks as if it’s modelled on Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo. Or there’s Gordon Ramsay, pictured last week with blond locks flopping into his eyes, but aggressively cropped around the back: trichologists attested that this was evidence of a transplant, in which follicles are “harvested” from dense areas and then replanted in the sparser regions.

As those examples show, the attempt at concealment can end up drawing attention to the problem it’s designed to mask. It risks making the person look vain. But that isn’t a worry for the famous: they tend to have buckets of self-confidence and in any case vanity is no longer considered a serious social sin. Vanity has been recalibrated as “looking after yourself”. Today’s politicians would rather be thought vain than bald.

Thankfully, I’m not a politician and I’m relaxed about reaching slaphead stage. I’ve been “a bit thin on top” for decades (so were my father and grandfather) and I’m glad I’m under no pressure to make alterations. No, not even a “Phil Mitchell”.

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France is facing a poplar crisis. There will soon be a shortage of the tall, fast-growing trees, because farmers aren’t planting enough, preferring to invest in more lucrative commodities. This is a worry, if you like the delicate boxes and crates that poplar white-wood is used for, to pack everything from Camembert to oysters, and now, I think, Charlie Bigham’s deluxe ready-meals.

Poplars are a reliable earner: that’s why the miser in Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet plants thousands of them in his fields by the banks of the Loire. The old story (from an age before sexual equality) was that dads with a spare field would plant poplars, then harvest and sell them 20 years later to fund a daughter’s wedding. So if the spiteful gossips saw a field of aged, gnarled poplars, they knew there was a daughter who, er, had yet to find the right man.

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Did you see Morrisons’ latest wheeze? The supermarket projected the image of a baguette on to Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, the rust-red sculpture that looks down on motorists powering up the A1 into Tyneside. The golden baguette, labelled “I’m cheaper”, was taken down after protests.

But supermarkets could exploit any number of artworks to publicise their wares. Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for margarine, say; Old Woman Frying Eggs by Velázquez stirs a craving for an egg; and Hahn/Cock, the giant blue cockerel on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, is ideal for halal chicken.

Andrew M Brown