Alien Head

You get out of the shower. There's a light directly above your head and a mirror in front of you, and it isn't a flattering light. My hair's fine anyway, so wet you're faced with exactly what you'll look like with no hair. That's when you work out what it's going to look like in public.

Then one night in Chichester, on the usual three-pub crawl, it came down between the second and the third. We ran for it. I got to the doormen of the next place and thought, there's no rescuing this. Lads, I'm going home. I didn't give an explanation. Just an announcement. Banter doesn't help when you're already that paranoid about it, so you take yourself out of it. I went past the door and carried on the jog, in the rain.

I got in, dried off and went to bed, not in a sulk, more a game over kind of way.

That wasn't a one-off. For most of my life, if I got caught in the rain on a night out, I'd just go home. Not because of the rain. Because of what the rain did to my hair: thinned it, slapped it against my head and showed the scalp underneath. A grown man leaving his own night out because the weather had exposed the thing he didn't want anyone to see. That's where I'm going to start. Not with anything heroic. With the smallest, most embarrassing version of a thing I reckon most of us do, whatever your particular version of it is: spend your whole life making sure nobody catches you at it.

You won't have heard of me, and that helps. I've nothing to sell you, I'm writing this in the middle of the Atlantic, still working myself out. What I've got instead is the stuff most of us keep under a hat. Friends tell me they like the stories; what they take away is what I learned from them. And a few years ago, almost by accident, I found out what happens when you take the hat off.

I had a hair transplant. I'd been dreading going thin on top my whole life, and when it came to it I booked it in about ten minutes.

And I'd timed it beautifully, or so I thought. I had a transatlantic crossing a few weeks later, so most of the regrowth would happen at sea, witnessed by only five other people. Perfect for hiding. Which was handy, because for the first few days you're a bloke in a headband with a swollen face whose own phone won't unlock for him because you look like you've got an alien head.

Except when the swelling went down, the need to hide went with it. So I did the opposite of the plan. I walked into the gym with it on full show, and I put the whole thing on the internet. It turned out a lot of men were carrying the exact same dread I had, and had been for years. Same anxiety. Same going-home-because-of-the-rain.

That's a story about hair. It taught me something I've turned out to be a very slow learner on. Being open about things you might be ashamed of doesn't shrink you. It connects you. It's usually the exact stuff that tells the next person they're not the only one.

But wait there. I'm not telling you this to flog hair transplants.

I'm telling you because the hair was the easy one. The hair you can see in a mirror and fix with a flight to Turkey. What goes on upstairs took a lot longer to look at. That's what the rest of this is. They tried to march me off an island and put me on a ferry, and the reason they gave me wasn't the reason. There's a taxi I got into on my own, outside a bar, and a woman I sent back into her own leaving party. That decision still sucks. I walked out of the best job I'll ever have. I've had two explanations for that ever since and I don't trust either of them. When my phone rings, my first thought isn't who is it, it's what do they need. I've been told I had six hours to reach a hospital or lose my foot. It took a global pandemic to get me the Christmas my family had said no to for ten years. And it took a therapist one sentence to make forty-odd years of it land at once. I've never fully agreed with the sentence.

Underneath all of it: being the kid nobody quite saw. Spending years trying to get someone to properly look. The wrong person who slowly talks you into believing you're the problem.

Yours won't be the same list. But I'd put money on you having one.

One more thing you should know. I've been writing things down for over twenty-five years: notes on my phone while I'm out walking, scribbles in a notebook, journals with the headings crossed out and rewritten. Nobody asked me to. Nobody was ever going to read it. This isn't the first time I've sat in this ocean and tried to get the pile of it into some order. Five years ago, on a different crossing, I wrote: I need to structure how I collate my thoughts for a book to come together. Then I didn't. Then I went back through the lot, and this is what came out. I'd stopped the therapy not long before. The sentence was a connection between how I react now and my childhood. I went looking anyway, and this is starting to help me a lot. So yes, I've Jerry Maguired the shit out of this.

Men not talking about their feelings is the version everyone's heard. The bit underneath it is that we don't evaluate how things land on us, what an exchange with somebody did to us. That's most of what's in here.

So this is me walking into the gym again, only this time with everything. For this to work, I have to listen to my own voice, see my own face, suck it up! And put out there what's usually locked up. I'll be straight: there's no tidy ending. No before-and-after photo where the hair's grown back and the man's all fixed. I'm writing this single, at forty-six, mid-ocean, still in the middle of it.

So here it is. The good, the bad, and the frankly horrific. Scabs and all.

And if you've ever turned for home because of the rain, whatever form your rain takes, you'll know exactly what I mean.