I knew how she felt. I'd reacted similarly myself an hour before when I realised that I'd lost something I'd cherished for more than 7 months. It was unplanned but ordained by the fates, the culmination of a train of events which had its genesis in male vanity.

My father, as long as I can remember, has been "a bit thin on top", to employ that delightful euphemism for male baldness, and my cousins have long been similarly afflicted. Due to a fortuitous role of the genetic dice, however, I have retained most of my hair, the downside of this good fortune being a lifelong search for the perfect hairdresser. Good hairdressers are as difficult to find as good mechanics and capable handymen, their mobile phone numbers traded like gold coins, the currency of the coiffure.

So a friend of mine who had been enduring a bad hair year rang another friend and begged for the number of someone who could tame her mane. She reappeared the next day a changed woman, hair gloriously chic and shaped. "Where did you go?" I asked and after I had beaten her about the head with a rolled up newspaper for several minutes, she gave me the telephone number. Not that there was anything wrong with the salon to which I was making regular and substantial cash donations. But I was curious so, muttering platitudes like "there's nothing like a change", I presented to a salon at South Bank.

"I have an appointment with Carole," I said and was shown to a chair and, as still happens in this unisex 2005 society, felt the eyes of every woman in the place upon me. I looked at my reflection in the mirror. I was looking particularly dishevelled, hair plastered like a wet mop across my head, my moustache hanging across my lip like a dissected toilet brush.

   "What are you doing here?" demanded a female voice and, dragging myself from my reverie, I regarded a statuesque woman with her hands on her hips.
   "Aw nuts," I thought. "Perhaps they don't allow men in here. I'm about to be thrown out on to the street."

"A haircut," I said, shifting in the chair. I was tempted to suggest that as it was a hair salon, the chances were I hadn't come in looking for a spare tyre for my bicycle. However, being cowardly to the core, I harboured the fear that if I played the smart arse she would cut my throat with the razor holstered on her waist.

   "That will have to go," she said.
   "What?" I squeaked.
   "That moustache. How long have you had it?"
   "Seven months," I said.
   "It's got to go," she shouted.

I blanched. I started growing that moustache back in July 2004. Everyone had moustaches then. Even the women. Mine was especially luxuriant, drooping down the side of my mouth and giving me the appearance of an extra off the set of a Clint Eastwood western. It had been there for so long and I had hoped it would be there for a while longer. I was about to tell Carole that no amount of cajoling would get me to part with my moustache. She could slash away at my hair but the moustache was a no-go zone. Then she uttered the magic words.

   "It will make you look even cuter," she said.
   "Really?" I said, batting my eyes and sitting upright. From that moment, we both knew she had me.

"Ok," I sighed and in a second she had whipped out a pair of electric clippers and the moustache was gone, in its place a white, pale strip of skin that had not seen daylight in over 29 weeks. The hair was next to suffer, clumps of it fluttering floorwards as her scissors sliced and slashed.

Half an hour later, I was sitting in my car in the South Bank car park, looking in the rearview mirror, fingering my upper lip and regarding my near nude skull. The white strip across my upper lip made me look like Fred Flintstone. Peculiarly, it felt easier to breathe now that the home grown filter that had been sitting under my nose had gone.

I went to work the next day where my clean shaven visage provided amusement for at least half the staff, people peering around my door all day and giggling. "Something's different about you. You've got new shoes," said one woman. "You've lost weight," said another. Another insisted I grow another moustache immediately as she found my bare face "disconcerting". Some shrieked with laughter and ran away holding their sides and others fell to the floor in hysterics.

A precious and treasured few, bless them, said they liked it. I'm still reminding myself to shave under my nose and have lost several litres of blood in doing so. I still frighten myself when I first look in the mirror in the morning and my girlfriend wants two weeks in which to make up her mind before passing judgement.