A PASSING cynic might suppose that columns such as these are written off the top of my head. This week they would be dead right.

Look at the top of many male heads, mine included, and you will not discover much in the way of hair. What used to be there has disappeared, rubbed away by something or other. Life probably.

Baldness takes a bit of getting used to, especially for those of us who grew up in the Seventies, when hair was big and wild. People are said to suffer pain in a missing arm or leg. Something similar can happen with hair.

If I look in a mirror, I sometimes sense the ghost of a hirsute past, a mad-locked teenager with a mushroom-cloud explosion of curly hair. It wasn't far off an Afro; close enough, anyway, to get me into bother with the blatantly bald headmaster at my grammar school. Silly old bald-bonced twit with a head as shiny as his shoes. Envious as hell, obviously.

Now the mirror gives back this balding chap with a quizzical expression. It is an image closer to the old headmaster than the hairy youth. Never mind.

The reason for such thoughts lies not in that troublesome old dear, male vanity. Well, not entirely. A headline did it, but not just any headline, a headline to lift the spirits of bald men everywhere. It went like this: "Hair stem cell find brings hope of refurbishing bald patches."

Not snappy, it is true. But what hope lies this way! The scientific bit goes like this: stem cells can regenerate hair growth by being planted into skin, whence they spontaneously grow into hair follicles which produce hair.

The stem cells are found in existing hair follicles, grown in a culture away from the head and then sprouted on the hairless skull. For this process to work, you have to have some hair left on your head. Hairs can be taken from those still clinging to the side or back of the head, grown on in the lab and then used to re-seed the hairless head.

According to George Cotsarelis, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania, this new treatment for baldness could be available within five to ten years.

At the moment, it works on mice. And that's good enough for me, so long as you don't end up growing a pink tail. Hell, it's probably all right if you do end up growing a pink tail.

Then again, while having a full bristling head would undeniably be nice, certain things happen and you get on with life.

Men losing their hair isn't high up the scale of human misery. Plastic surgery done in the name of vanity has always struck me as weird. So wouldn't sprouting hair back on a smooth head fall into the same category? Isn't it better to accept yourself the way you are?

Almost certainly, but we are talking about hair here.

Not all male baldies are unhappy with their hairless lot. If you whack the word "bald" into Google, you come up with lots of sites. Mostly they are American, but the US does have the Bald Eagle as a symbol of pride, so this is not surprising.

My favourite was Bald R Us, which boasts the racy slogan: "I'm Too Sexy For My Hair." This site contains stories, letters and star slots (Bald Member Of The Month: US motorcycle show host Greg White, shown grinning underneath his polished dome). Ron Coleman smiles out from the Bald Man Hall Of Fame.

Ron is a former Mr Olympia whose burnished head sits atop a body with massively over-inflated muscles. For some reason this sight brings to mind a snooker ball balanced on a suit of armour.

There are even some suggested "answers to bald jokes". One of these ripostes goes like this: "Did you know that hair is really dead? I guess that means your head is a corpse."

The trouble with such a reply is that it suggests all sense of humour has been lost along with the hair.

Updated: 12:09 Thursday, March 18, 2004