If you are a middle-aged man then two things are going to happen to your hair soon: it’s going to fall out and it’s going to turn grey. My dad managed to escape both of these until he reached 60 years of age, but everyone accused him (unfairly) of using Grecian 2000, so he didn’t even get to enjoy this good fortune properly.

Last week I was at a gathering where a lot of middle-aged women were present. Their hair was amazing. None of them had adopted the horrible, worst-of-the-70s styles currently clinging to many of the heads of The Young People, but a lot of them sported up-to-the-minute looks that had clearly been engineered by Brighton & Hove’s finest stylists. The colouring, the cuts, the glossiness of their barnets were all Hollywood-grade.

It’s a tired, false, and scientifically illiterate complaint of certain “feminists” that because society is run by men far more money and effort have been invested in research into contraceptives that act on women. The crudest refutation is simple: to interfere with conception you can either stop one egg a month or stop 90 million sperm; which target would you aim for?

If I stumbled upon a cure for baldness tomorrow then I’m sure I would be a multi-billionaire within a few years, but looking at all those amazing ‘dos the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the reason middle-aged women’s hair is so much better than middle-aged men’s is that (partly thanks to the achievements of real feminism) the former can and do spend so much more money on theirs than the latter. And they’ve got more of it attached to their heads to spend money on of course.