Growing your beard. Losing your hair. Two very significant events in most men’s lives. Usually separated by a few decades in most. A decade in the unfortunate, and for the cursed, weeks.

I count myself amongst the cursed. Or blessed as I have now learnt to look at it. Yessir, I am amongst those for whom the joy of sighting a lone renegade hair growing at the bottom end of my face was quickly and cruelly tempered by the not-long-after realisation that one’s forehead area was pulling a major blitzkrieg in search of more cranial lebensraum. Now balding is in itself not a bad thing. In fact I consider it to be just another progressive evolutionary step-all our evolutionary stages have after all been marked a significant loss of body hair at each discernible stage of the process. Think of all the UFO/Alien abduction stories you have encountered, have any of the probe wielders featured in the sordidly fantastical tale been described as sporting ‘fros? Mohawks? Friday night in Benoni mullets? No? Why? Because hairlessness is directly proportional to biological advancement.

And if we are being frank, what use does cranial hair serve besides enabling the existence of such blights on mankind’s existence as the haircare industry and hairdressers types?

It’s also not so much that I considered myself immune to any such possibilities. My family has a long line of proud cranial real estate proprietors. I knew it was coming, along with greys, shameful sessions involving lubed up fingers in doctors rooms and little blue assistants from the kind people at Pfizer. But that’s the thing, it was meant to be along with those other signposts to the erm “golden years”. But the fates clearly had set out a different path for me. So it came to be that in the dawn of my manhood, my hair, probably led by some renegade Moses follicle, decided to migrate from the top of my (rather well formed head) to my (even better formed chin), upper lip, face and then curiously-my neck.

That was the mind bender. I have facial hair that could cow a 600kg silverback into handing over his entire patch of jungle without any breastbones getting pummelled. And where I would normally have hair? Nought, nada, zilch. And all this before the age of 21. But I soon discovered there are advantages to being “unburdened” of redundant hair, for example;

1.Having a defining feature in common with John McLane, or as he prefers to be known in his other life-Bruce Willis

2.Never having stupid haircuts that put women off. A personal anecdote- when I started balding, I had been thinking of doing my hair up in cornrows. Let us be glad the heavens overruled THAT particular prayer.

3.Linked to (2) above, never having stupid haircuts “immortalised” in pictures and videos for my wife and kids to use as a counter against my Omnipotent Man of the House ambitions

4.Low maintenance. Which is surely the essence of being a man?

5.That cool effect when the sun shines down on your bonce at an angle and the reflected glare causes people to look at you in that eyes cast aside manner reserved for the gods and angry spouses.

6.You can judge heavily bouffanted celeb ponces without coming across as a hypocrite. Yes, I’m looking at you Mullet Trapido.

The downsides? The nicknames I guess. Though to be honest they are less a downside and more an opening for witty responses to ill-timed jibes. The thing about balding nicknames is that they are quite limited and so get tired very very quickly. There’s the stunningly original and witty “baldy”, the lame “chrome dome”, the flat “stadium” and the rather crude ngengelezi (which is Zulu for “learn an African language and stop asking annoying questions”). Then there is the first fresh winter draught and the ill-timed (i.e. in the presence of hot females) girly shivers it induces. That I can do without.

Now the thing about balding is that you only really have two choices when it comes to living with it. Be sensible and shave it off, or embarrass yourself by living in a Trump-esque delusion of combovers (not really an option for a darkie) or possibly worse-get the whole amphitheatre look going by defiantly growing the rest around it.

I,rather uncharacteristically it must be said, I chose the sensible option, and thus began a decade long search for the perfect shaving experience (shaving now having become an all-round holistic venture for myself). And it has been quite the search. From being sat, roasting in the sun on random stools at taxi ranks-where R10 buys free razor burn, fervent views on the state of SA football/politics/women, and a veld fire hazard baptism in methylated spirits to round things off, to the poshest of the new generation of LSM A targeted black salons where everything is such a statement of tacky fake “I have arrived” consumerism that it’s little wonder they never ask for your bank statement at the door and the ambient testosterone level is so low my feminine side and I get to do some serious bonding.

I will however, say one thing in defence of these palaces of shallowness- the feeling of soft, perfumed feminine hands massaging warm water over one’s freshly denuded scalp is almost worth the follicular regression in itself.
Right now, having recently relocated and not yet brave enough to erm...brave eNolidi, or Noord Str as it was known in the dark old days,

I am going through something of a DIY phase. A pair of Gillete razors (I do wonder if these will permanently turn me onto white women a la Tiger, Thierry and Bryan?), shaving cream and aftershave. 10mins every other day on the shower. Sorted like Lionel Newton. As you can imagine the first few occasions of this new solution were not without incident or harm, but slowly surely I am getting into it. What’s amazing is how before I started balding, making arrangements for a haircut was a schlep as undesirable as sitting through a Meg Ryan flick with no guarantee of pity copulation. Now though? It’s like brushing my teeth in the morning. Or a moment in the shower.

So 10yrs later, I’m loving my uber evolved chrome dome. It’s version on scarcity has opened up a whole new world to me.