My partner Simon started losing his hair in his mid-teens. We met at university and he “confessed” his hair loss to me one evening. He had presumed that I had just been nice about it by not commenting on it before. Actually, I hadn’t noticed and, I’m ashamed to say, I didn’t take it remotely seriously when he told me. I thought he looked great and I couldn’t imagine that him losing his hair was going to alter the way I felt. I found myself urging a denial on him, that he wasn’t losing it.

I didn’t understand then how it was already affecting his self-confidence, or how hair-loss deeply affects whole families. Even in his university days, Simon knew what to expect because his father John’s hair had begun to fall out at when he was 15. His father still feels guilty about this inheritance. “Of all the things I could have given him, he gets that,” he told me.

When Simon started to lose his hair at about the same age as his dad, his father tried to salve his guilt by taking him to a trichologist. This was in the late Sixties, when shaving your head was done only for ringworm and a comb- over was de rigueur. He emerged clutching various lotions for rubbing on to his head, and his father emerged £1,000 lighter in the wallet.

Hair did grow, but very fine baby hair, which seemed only to highlight rather than solve the problem. Simon still swears that trichologist is Latin for “man with lustrous hair and big car”.

It wasn’t until I lived with Simon that I realised how pervasive an issue balding can be. Because of his sensitivity, I became hypersensitive to baldness being mentioned on television, especially when it crops up as a metaphor for failure or lack of virility. You probably don’t remember that Tosca in the BBC drama Our Friends in The North dismissed a potential band member as “a wee baldie man” or that Seinfeld’s George Costanza’s most vicious self-hatred diatribes were reserved for his own hair loss, but I do.

Baldness is still a legitimate target for ridicule. When Simon is with friends I notice that regular jocular remarks are made about it and that he will make self-deprecating remarks about it himself. Men laugh at what they fear and maybe by laughing at someone else, they hope they are appeasing the follicle gods.

Look at the Spurs manager, who routinely trots on to the pitch amid an affectionate chorus from his fans of: “Martin Jol, Martin Jol/He’s got no hair/ We don’t care.”

Not that Simon didn’t have a sense of humour about it: he would ruefully recount trips to his glamorous hairdresser Cheryl, who would say soothingly: “It’s not coming out, it’s just very very fine,” while carefully avoiding showing him the overhead angle.

But despite the frequent polls that declare the actors Bruce Willis and Patrick Stewart as sex gods, Simon doesn’t believe for a second that some women genuinely prefer men with no hair. “Floppy-haired git” is his most withering dismissal of another man. He has a sort of radar for other men whose hair is going. “Give it six months”, he will mutter under his breath, or “Bite the bullet, mate”, if a bloke who has a sparse hair arrangement appears on telly.

About eight years ago, Simon decided to shave his head, with my encouragement. I think he felt relieved when the last hair finally went. It stopped the anxious ritual of peering in the mirror for new losses and seemed to give him confidence, though extra thought has to be given to clothing; he has noticed that wearing a poloneck with a shaved head gives “that boiled-egg look”.

We now have an eighteen-month-old son, William, who will in all likelihood begin to lose his hair early, too. He has the same white blond fluffy hair that Simon had as a baby. I am already planning how I can make sure that William has a positive enough self-image for it not to be dented by the inevitable hair loss. It will help tremendously that he is growing up in a time when footballers and pop stars choose to have shaved heads and that he won’t see his father wrestling with recalcitrant strands of hair to look socially acceptable. Nothing is going to compensate for the fact that as a teenager he is going to be acutely aware of his hair but, if he sees his father and his grandfather looking good with shaved heads, and not constantly making or taking jokes about baldness, it may be one of the less traumatic parts of his adolescence.

The bald truth

The Government is reported to be investing £1.9 million in the biotech company Intercytex, and its new treatment for baldness — harvesting hair follicles from the scalp, multiplying them in a lab, and then re-implanting them in the scalp.