Every morning I'm confronted by a bathroom sink coated in a liberal sprinkling of my own hair. They are like rats deserting a sinking ship.
Each one of those hairs has made a desperate bid for freedom before the bonce they inhabit hits the rocks.
I don't blame them.
For years they enjoyed the high life. Coated in a glutinous mass of the finest hair products £2.35 could buy, they w
ould bounce the night away to Tone Loc and his Funky Cold Medina in the fleshpots of South Shields.
While the body may have ended up slumped in a doorway cuddling a kebab, those hairs would stand proud, defying the insistent urges of the prevailing wind.
These days they've surrendered. Hanging limply by as I spend evenings clearing out the loft or scrubbing the toilet.
That's not the life for a strand of hair. It yearns for excitement and adventure. I pray those departing hairs find what they seek every time I flush them down the plughole.
My wife isn't too happy at the prospect of the Ord tresses doing a runner.
"The skinny look is okay when you've got long hair, but it won't work on you when you're bald," she warned.
"If you're going to lose your hair you'd better get down the gym. Bald only works with muscles."
"You mean," I said. "I'll have to go the full Phil Mitchell?"
A short back and Mitchell, please
"Yes," she replied gravely. It's a sobering thought.
And it was hair that was the cause of tears among the kids in the Ord household this week … thanks in part to Paul McCartney.
My wife gave our eight-year-old a haircut he was far from pleased with.
One minute he's sporting Raphael Nadal locks complete with white headband, next he's got a Sixties mop top.
Given the release of the complete back catalogue of The Beatles this week you'd have thought his pudding bowl hairstyle would be at the cutting edge of fashion. Not so.
"Dad says I look like Paul McCartney," our Bradley sobbed, "I don't want to back to school looking like this."
He had a point, but hairstyles for schoolkids these days are beyond a joke.
Tears over school haircuts were once reserved for the moment when the barber snipped a small chunk out of your ear when delivering the uniform short back and sides. Today there are tantrums if the stylist fails to shave a perfect Nike logo into the side of a Mohican on the average eight-year-old or dyes their bonce the wrong shade of blue.
Even our five-year-old has got in on the act. While our Bradley was searching for a hat to wear for his first day back at school, our Isaac had managed to get his mitts on a tub of hair gel from the bathroom cupboard and moulded his blond locks into a dunce's cap. My wife caught him just as he was about to spray his sculpted hair cone a striking shade of red.
Perhaps my wife has hit upon the perfect solution. If both the boys and I go the full Phil Mitchell, all our hair problems will be a thing of the past. It's worth a shot.
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Are our organised gangs softening?
I read this week about a crime gang intimidating a police witness in Newcastle by leaving a severed pig's head on her doorstep.
Horrific yes, but I feel the gang sort of muddied the intimidation waters by dressing the head in a policeman's helmet and stuffing a cigar in its mouth. Did the witness scream, and then stifle a giggle?
The comic additions, however, didn't stop neighbours from likening the sight to that infamous scene in The Godfather where a movie producer who has crossed the Mafia wakes to find the severed head of his favourite horse in his bed.
A natural comparison you would say, but I would suggest much of the potency of this horse's head scene would have been lost had the head in question been sporting a Stetson with a Hamlet cigar hanging from its bottom lip. But what do I know?
The crime witness in the Newcastle case, naturally, fears for her safety. After all, a dark figure could emerge from the shadows when she least expects it … and stick a "kick me" sign on her back.
