Big Hair. Bad Hair. What Hair.

Hair can and will affect our confidence. Rule No.1: Get a good haircut. Bad hair – and there's a lot of it about – is like letting moss and unsightly weeds grow on the natural slate roof of a beautiful Cotswold stone cottage and not mending any broken slates. Or worse. Putting a corrugated iron roof on such a beautiful picture postcard home.

There are people who, in hair terms, do the equivalent: women who, for some baffling reason, allow or even encourage a hairdresser to create something so severe and visually distressing that, if they were a house, they'd never get it past council planners; and men who, in the same vein, would be sued for neglect. Just as such houses won't sell, nor will people buy into you as easily as if your face is not better framed.

For those men with receding, balding or temporarily mislaid hair (theft is on the increase it seems. Mine was confiscated by French Customs officials 2 years ago and interned at a refuge for baffling creatures) then cut or shave it more closely. Things have moved on a lot since the 7th century when the tonsure first tormented Catholic monks. Comb-overs are just ephemeral comedy value and will make sure you stay single while keeping the girls (and boys too, for that matter) amused – but for all the wrong reasons. And, as for toupees, they should be outlawed in right thinking countries and confiscated on sight and given a good home somewhere else...like the inside of a cushion.