Musashino Musings

One of the great things about the internet is the way that it has democratised writing. Once upon a time, getting your work into print was the hard-won privilege of the favoured few - at least, those who didn't want to stump up the cost of vanity publishing. Now we have Amazon, and anyone with a computer and a story to tell can have a go.

Predictably, this has generated an awful lot of tosh. I spend a lot of time looking for authors worth reading on my Kindle, and a lot of the time it's like searching for a Wispa bar in a sea of turds. Just occasionally I stumble across someone really worth the effort, like the excellent Carrot Quinn (see my links). But more often than not I find myself getting to the end of a slim volume and thinking "What the bloody hell was the point of that"?

One such example was the book on "Over 50's Fitness" I previewed last night. Among the earth-shattering insights offered by the author was the fact that you slow down as you get older and you probably shouldn't try to go from coach potato to marathon runner in one month. But the one thing that really tickled me was the author's authoritative run-down on medical conditions likely to afflict the over 50's. Number 1 was stiff joints. Well, OK we all feel a bit stiff in the mornings. Number 2 was hair loss.

Now, I had never considered hair loss due to natural ageing to be a medical condition. But our font-of-all-knowledge solemnly assures us that the psychological impact of male hair loss can be catastrophic. Really?

Let's face it, most of us blokes are going to go a bit threadbare up top as we get older. For the vast majority of us, it's going to occur in our thirties, and for the vast majority of us, we're over lamenting the loss of our youthful mane in a very short space of time. Just have it cut short and get on with life. There are always going to be some that just can't handle it, finding solace in the syrup or hair transplant or comb-over for the stingy ones. Incidentally, the comb-over is known as "the bar code" in Japan - which always makes me laugh.

I feel sorry for anyone that struggles to come to terms with approaching slap-headedness. But at the same time, I can't help thinking that their grasp on their masculinity must be a bit flimsy at best if they allow it to be defined by their lack of spam. It's a well-known fact that male pattern baldness is in fact dictated by the amount of testosterone flowing through your veins. Therefore baldness surely should be celebrated as a badge of honour rather than covered up and cited as a cause of psychological trauma. Mr "Fit Fifty" is talking out of his arse.

And anyway, as any bloke over fifty knows, your hair doesn't disappear - it merely migrates from the sunlight uplands of your bonce to the shaded groves of nostril and ear lobe!