When I was young, in the 1980s and the bit of the 1990s that lasted until Kurt Cobain shot himself, I really cared about my hair.

I'd spend hours fiddling with it. I once spent a whole evening in a rapidly cooling bath with my hair shampooed into spikes because I'd read that was how the punks did it. It wasn't.

I also owned a hairdryer, a fact which caused much hilarity in my house recently when the kids found out. It looked like the sort of thing Arthur Montford would commentate into during football matches. It also delivered regular electric shocks though never of a voltage powerful enough to make my hair stand on end, the look I was trying to achieve by blow drying it in the first place.

Back then my hair idols were Ian McCulloch, from Echo And The Bunnymen, and Robert Smith from The Cure. A female friend - I forget who, but I'm eternally grateful - gleefully inducted me into the arcane rite of back-combing the hair to make it suitably tousled-looking. Cultural theorist Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book Outliers that if you spend 10,000 hours doing anything, you'll become world class. I got pretty good at back-combing.

Other hair idols included, in no particular chronological order, the scary-looking guy from David Lynch's film Eraserhead, Theatre Of Hate lead singer Kirk Brandon, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and any one of The Stray Cats - though preferably Slim Jim Phantom because he had a cool name and he was married to Britt Eckland, whose appearance in an itsy-bitsy bikini in The Man With The Golden Gun had had a profound effect on my teenage self.

These days my interest in things tonsorial has changed. In sense it has become inverted - I've been so obsessed with beards for the last few years that I've tended to ignore anything above the nose. I've also sported a number two clipper cut for the last decade, so my own need for anything resembling a hairstyle has been eradicated.

But there's another reason why I've ignored haircuts since the turn of the century: they're so boring these days.

At this point I'd usually write something like "but all that is changing ..." and bring you news of some earth-shattering development in the world of men's hairstyles. But apart from the glut of bottle blonds doing the rounds (see the Male Order of February 7), it's all quiet on that front. And that's the problem: today's supposedly cool haircut is basically the same one every man under 60 sported between the start of the First World War and the end of the second one.

Sure, the sight of a particularly exaggerated form of it on a group of spotty 15-year-olds can leave you slack-jawed with wonder, but the over-riding emotion is pity rather than envy. How sad that their hair idols are their own great-grandfathers. How sad that in the best years of their lives - hair-wise, anyway - they all want to look like Joey Barton channelling George Orwell.

Get a life, kids. And get a hairdryer while you're at it.