Who will lead us in this new age of hair amputations and GUBU loss?

DESPERATE distraction, all this Fianna Fáil leadership stuff, isn’t it?

Especially because — until yesterday afternoon — there was no clear end in sight.

One of the Taoiseach’s more fascinating characteristics is his capacity to be both decisively indecisive and imprecisely precise. The consultative process with the lads, he decisively and precisely announced, would be done and dusted within a day. Or two. Certainly by yesterday.

The missing bit, of course, was clarity around when he was going to announce his decision about his reflection about what the lads told him. Could have been yesterday. Could have been today. Conor Lenihan, on radio on Friday, said it would definitely be made by Tuesday of this week. Or possibly Thursday.

Over on the Green benches, John Gormley’s annoyed about this distraction, which, if it hasn’t forced him and his parliamentary colleagues to go up every tree in north Dublin, certainly forced them to do a bit of investigation although, he admits, Sherlock Holmes he’s not. And they’re not, collectively. Anyway, he says, we shouldn’t be distracted from important issues like the Climate Change Bill by the internal leadership squabbles of Fianna Fáil.

I’m with John, up to a point. Here’s the point. I worry about Fianna Fáil’s leadership trauma ensuring less coverage than normal for the story about the woman who took the BBC to court for ageism and sexism. She won on the former, although not on the latter, which mystifies me, given the facts, but you know what they say about the law.

This TV presenter, once she passed the first blush of youth, found her boss making suggestions about her having work done — meaning cosmetic surgery work on her naturally ageing face — and maybe getting a bit of Botox.

Now, I think Botox is wonderful. What other intervention stops you looking worried/furious (which most of us look, right now), stops you getting the deep worried and furious lines which result from the daily expression, repeated over time, which it’s going to be, and prevent migraine headaches into the bargain? My boss should pay for me to have it every six months as a health measure, but I lack the courage to raise it with him directly.

In this regard, I have a certain sympathy for Gordon Ramsay, who is alleged to have had chunks of good hair amputated from the back of his head and moved to the front.

Sympathy, first of all, because I’ve suffered hair amputation myself. In the early days of our marriage, your correspondent was possessed of a mighty head of red hair. Pure Pegeen Mike, I was, with wild hair flapping free, almost to waist level (not that I had a waist, but let’s move on). Three weeks after the wedding, I had it all chopped off.

The man I married was given to rising on his elbow in the bed to make a stirring statement about some issue of major importance, either to the nation or to us, and he never checked before he put most of his weight on his elbow, that my flowing locks were not beneath it. Tore chunks of my hair out by the roots, he did. It was exquisitely painful. And when the new stuff grew in, it looked very odd.

GORDON Ramsay can’t blame his wife for his hair deficit, since it’s at the front and would be difficult to lean on, but he is afraid of looking bald on the telly, and his fear is justified.

The wonderful Sean Moncrieff, of this parish and of Newstalk, recently referred, with weary patience, to the constant smartarsery he has to bear from people — it sounded as if those people were mostly men — about the fact that he has shed his hair. It’s the one aspect of a man’s appearance which provokes cruelty dressed up as comedy, justified — wrongly — by the “ah, he doesn’t mind” statement.

Nor is it just men who get cheap laughs from other men’s baldness. The wit and stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, on whom the musical Gypsy was based, used to saunter down the runway leading from the stage of Minsky’s Broadway Theatre in order to get nearer to her audience. As they screamed for her to remove more of her clothes, she would single out some bald unfortunate.

“Where have you been all my life?” she would ask him, embracing him warmly and planting a kiss on the top of his head, leaving the mark of her lips there like a shout. Most of the men subjected to this treatment leaped to their feet and ran out of the theatre.

Against that background, it makes sense for Gordon to transport hair from one part of his head to another. It’s his choice. And that’s the point.

It’s acceptable to save up and get a nose job if your nose causes you daily grief, or to get your breasts reduced if their weight is causing you appalling back pain. Similarly, it’s acceptable to tell a friend — if he or she asks — about Botox or fillers or other interventions designed to reduce wrinkles or sagging. It is not acceptable to indicate to an employee that if she doesn’t get the lips plumped up and the forehead smoothed, someone younger might be brought in to do her job. That, the court ruled in the case taken against the Beeb, is ageism and it’s not permitted.

All of which is good news for women of all ages in television and for a few men, too, although a survey would show, I would bet, that only a tiny percentage of male presenters worry about the possibility of age cramping their career.

However, while the court decision is a useful precedent in warning TV stations not to judge presenters on their wrinkle -count, anybody wanting to avoid being categorised as old needs to look beyond appearance. It’s the behaviour that’s the real give-away. The following five are just the beginning of a longer list. Offers to be added to this list will be gratefully received.

1. Old is when you can’t programme the box under your TV screen to record and play back the programmes you miss and think it’s funny to be dependent on your children to do it for you.

2. Old is when you’re held together on a daily basis by ingesting enough pills of different shapes and colours to fill a Smartie box — and you leave them out in the open.

3. Old is when you get on Joe Duffy’s Liveline and can tell the story of an outrage that happened to you the day before yesterday, only by starting back in 1973.

4. Old is when you give out about mispronunciations on the part of radio presenters or complain about their constant misuse of “déjà vu” (really old is when you write letters to massive companies to correct mis-spellings in their last letter to you).

5. Old is when you announce that Fianna Fáil have gone back into the GUBU days — and when asked for an explanation by the baffled young people present, can’t quite remember what each of the initials stands for.