You do worry when you are asked to write about hair loss, impotence and prostate issues in the same sentence.

It means you have reached a certain age when you might know about one or all three of these things with some authority. Thankfully, as far as I am aware, I am only follically challenged, or as we were allowed to say in pre-politically correct days, bald.

I have learned to live with it for some years now. There are bits at the back and sides and I am advised it is male pattern baldness. I didn’t choose the pattern, it was probably chosen for me by my father’s genes. Most of his family were similarly affected, apart from his mother and sisters, so it was destined that I would follow suit.

It creeps up on you gradually and is usually spotted by a third party making ungracious remarks about the hole in the back of your hair. You can’t see it at first but progressively you take on the “Bobby Charlton” look and your parting slips to somewhere near your left ear, until, in exasperation, you chop of the offending locks.

I had a luxurious head of hair, and a beard, and have never been able to fathom why the beard couldn’t have gone bald instead of my head. I could have lived with that!

I considered a reversal of my head, but thought better of it for it would have proved what many have said, that I talk out of the top of my head.

I’ve had my laughs from it too. I used to go to a favourite Cantonese restaurant where May, a Thai waitress, was only five feet tall, sorry vertically challenged. The exchange was always, from me, “Hi Shorty”, to which she would reply, “Hello Baldie.”

We’d both probably be arrested and imprisoned for it now.

The most common form of baldness is androgenic alopecia, or male pattern. Then there’s alopecia areata, which is loss of hair from some of the head. The more extreme form is alopecia totalis which is loss of hair from all of the head, or some people suffer alopecia universalis which is loss of all body hair.

Receding hairlines are usually seen in males over the age of 30 and you have a four in seven chance of being one of them. If you have a baldness that becomes a great gap on top it’s probably androgenetic alopecia which is caused by dihydrotestosterone, DHT, a powerful sex hormone, body, and facial hair growth promoter which can adversely affect the prostate as well as the hair on the head.

Now you know where the old wives’ tale about baldness and virility comes from, and it does have some merit in it. There that should make a few feel better!

There is a riot of pills and potions out there which claim to restore hair. Forget it. It’s 20 years since I tried a home made remedy from a lady who swore by it. All that happened was that I became instantly attractive to chickens, which probably had something to do with the smell of the vile stuff.

I view the fashion for shaved heads with some comfort. Perhaps they are going for the strong, virile look which comes naturally for some of us!

Baldness isn’t only a human trait. Chimpanzees, stump-tailed macaques and South American uakari suffer progressive thinning of hair on the scalp after adolescence, and vultures evolved a bald head for heat regulation and to prevent their diet of rotting meat from sticking in their head plumage.

You will get over the psychological problems of baldness and my advice is then to enjoy it. Actor Patrick Stewart was named the sexiest man on TV as the completely shaven headed Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek, so there’s hope for all us Third Age baldies yet!

Editor, Third Age.