What’s that on your head?

Each morning, when I opened my eyes, there was another clump of hair on the pillow. Within two weeks, I was two-thirds bald with an absurd black tuft projecting two inches over my forehead. It was radiotherapy, of course, supposedly the only remedy after the surgeon failed to remove every bit of a brain tumour. Yes, it was worrying, but in hindsight it was also a time of high comedy.

After three weeks of treatment, I went on holiday to Cornwall. My young children looked a little more appalled each day and my wife Philippa pretended not to notice. After the holiday the treatment went on for another three weeks: a made-to-measure plastic mask bolted my head to the table, and the nurses directed two shafts of coloured light at the same tiny point on my brow. No one had told me the radio beams would leave a curious pattern of baldness and in the mirror I noticed that the pattern on my scalp looked exactly like the map of where we’d been staying: the left-hand bit of Cornwall from, say, Falmouth to St Ives, with the tuft marking out Land’s End.

When I went back to the hospital the doctor told me not to worry, it all looked totally normal. Normal? My job then was presenting a regional ITV current affairs series and I appeared two or three times per programme. I wasn’t entirely sure that the viewers would agree with the doctor’s idea of normal. ‘Oh yes, everyone looks like that after radiotherapy to the front of the head,’ said the doctor. ‘But don’t worry, the NHS provides free wigs.’ So I sat down to choose from a hospital catalogue. There wasn’t a great selection, but one that was black and quite thick looked nearest the mark. ‘What a wise choice,’ the doctor said.