You just can’t prevent your eyes from drifting up towards it. As Brian Beacom talks, you try to hold his gaze steadily. You try telling yourself there’s nothing worth staring at up there. You even try, by a process of intense concentration, to relocate your visual faculty to the top of your forehead, so that it isn’t quite so obvious you’re looking.

But it’s no use. It’s a bit like trying to ignore the fact that the man opposite has a tarantula perched atop his cranium, flicking through a tiny newspaper. It’s a policeman saying: “There’s nothing to see here,” as a lorry full of fireworks crashes into a truck from the match factory. It’s the elephant in the room, the hair in the souffle. Your mind stands on tiptoe to get a better view.

Such are the guilty curiosities provoked by close proximity to a hair transplant.

Not that Beacom, 52, the showbiz editor of Glasgow’s evening newspaper, seems to mind particularly. He attempts to conceal his rethatching as strenuously as Sir Elton John strives to conceal his temper.

Beacom’s rather proud of it, in fact, as a gardener might be of a row of delphiniums flourishing in barren soil. And he’s here to tell us, or at least those of us who fear the splat of raindrop against compromised crown, that men need not suffer in silence.

According to his frank, funny memoir of follicular can-do, Diary of a Hair Transplant, there can be life after the parting has departed; proud, confident life, unsullied by the threat of sniggering or of small boys pointing.

“There’s an American writer who describes baldness as cancer of the soul,” Beacom says. “It sounds a bit extreme, but from the moment it begins to happen to you, your masculinity is threatened, you’re not going to attract women, you’ll become an object of ridicule.

Men use it as a way of putting other men down. It’s the insult you can’t answer back to. It’s always used as the final word in any argument with a man — he only has to say, ‘Well, you’re bald,’ and he’s won. Men are extremely comfortable with men who are bald. You are marginalised, you’re a nobody.”

Since late adolescence, Beacom had been dying the thousand slow deaths of hair today, gone tomorrow. His self-esteem was gradually clogging up the plughole. The humiliation was compounded by the absence of genetic solace: Beacom’s father never relinquished his own fine head of hair. His son, though, looked on helplessly as his scalp made its concerted attempt to break cover. He’d undergone three decades of self-delusion and diversionary tactics (volume-enhancing shampoos, an allergy to mirrors, the optimistic re-arrangement of what hairs remained), he says, before going out in public.

“I just always knew I’d be less comfortable in my own skin if there wasn’t hair on the top of my head,” he says. “And I always knew technology would find a way to fix the problem. How could it not, given how deeply we’re affected by hair loss? The real worry was whether the technology would come along in time to be of any benefit to me.”

In the meantime, his hairdresser had dropped the price of a trim by £5 in recognition that the job was swifter than it used to be. But the final brush with the bald truth arrived three years ago. Beacom was paying for petrol in Renfrew when he caught sight of a CCTV monitor. He wondered why there was a chronically balding chap on the screen who wasn’t to be seen at the till. And then the penny dropped. The situation was even more critical than Beacom had dared admit. He was now a fully paid-up member of the Tufty Club. Something had to be done. Something that actually worked.

“I confess I did resort to a couple of hair-saving strategies,” he says. “I hung upside down quite a lot like a bat. I’d bought a book in which the basic tenet was that the head needed increased blood to grow hair. It never occurred to me that many yoga practitioners are bald. So I took to hanging over the balcony on my hall stairs for a while, until I realised even baldness would be preferable to paraplegia.”

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