There were a few awkward moments down the years. Shortly before we went on holiday to Spain with our friends Cathy and Pete one year, Cathy casually mentioned the recent ghastly spectacle of a male colleague's hairy back.
"It was disgusting," she said, practically spitting out the words. "Honestly, from behind he looked like an orangutan."
Jane then shattered the fleeting pause that followed. "Erm, Brian has a hairy back," she said, sweetly. "You'll be seeing quite a lot of it next week."
Whether or not I reminded Cathy of an orangutan as I cavorted in the Mediterranean shallows with my young children, she was too polite to say.
In any case it was too late. I knew that part of me disgusted her.
But if anything, episodes like that - and another, years later, at Center Parcs, when I felt the appalled gaze of some other friends as I clambered up the ladder to the water slide - made me rather defiantly proud of my hirsuteness.
I've never been a vain man. Jane often tells me I'm the least vain person she knows, which is not quite the compliment it seems. Nonetheless, since my 20s, despite playing plenty of sport, I've been fighting upper-body flab with only sporadic success.
So a covering of hair seemed to lend at least one dimension of alpha maleness to a torso that was more It Ain't Half Hot Mum's Don Estelle than Mad Men's Don Draper. After all, if you're saddled with man boobs, it's surely best they stay as unfeminine as possible. Besides, when I thought about waxing at all, it was as something only women and some gay men did.
So why did I decide to get rid of it all? The moment came at this year's Cannes Film Festival, which I attended as the Mail's film critic.
But the urge didn't strike when I was standing by a pool or marvelling at the parade of beautiful people on the beach. Instead, it was while I was watching a film, when a character took his shirt off and I thought: "Ugh!"
In this film, a hairy back was the least of this chap's problems - he was a prisoner of the Nazis - but still I couldn't stop my eyes wandering to the forest growing from the small of his back to his shoulder blades.
"That's what Jane sees every night," I thought. "It's not nice."
Back at home, I kept the momentous decision to strip away my pelt to myself, not even telling my nearest and dearest. I live in rural Herefordshire, where he-men have their sheep sheared, not themselves. So I resolved to have it done in London, just in case word got out.
The Station Spa in Covent Garden, Central London, specialises in treatments for men - women weren't even admitted as customers until earlier this year. Of all the men they wax, around 30 per cent are heterosexual - a number growing all the time thanks, they say, to the super-smooth example of David Beckham.
Whether the male of the species is daft enough to think that if he's as smooth as Beckham he might also look as attractive is, I suppose, a moot point.
But certainly the former England football captain seems to be the most visibly and influentially hairless of male role models. There are two areas men have waxed: above the waist and below. At the spa, they use the euphemisms "overground" and "underground".
The latter treatments are given names relating to the London Underground, not to be gimmicky or twee, but as a form of code to save embarrassment for anyone who might be overheard calling from the office to book an appointment.
So, waxing of the inner thigh is a Forest Hill; of the buttocks, a Circle Line; and of the pubic area, a Hampstead Heath. Cockfosters, Arsenal, Hanger Lane and Kew Gardens are better left, in a family newspaper, to the imagination.
My treatment was emphatically overground, requiring no coy codewords over the phone. I'd decided that if I was going to get my back done, I may as well go the whole hog (a cruel metaphor, but perhaps not undeserved) and offer them my front.
And so it began, with my therapist Luca painting copious amounts of unpleasantly hot blue wax on to my back, then applying strips of cloth and ripping them off with the same extravagant action I use to start my pull-cord lawnmower. The difference being that when I mow, there's some grass left when I've finished. I wish I could say I lay on the treatment bed taking all this with barely a flinch. The truth is I yelped and there may, I fear, have been a string of expletives. Or at any rate one expletive a string of times.
It was probably the most pain I've ever felt, even though I once dislocated a kneecap playing rugby. But I lay there as stoically as I could, trying to remember with each harrowing rip that my dear wife has endured childbirth three times.
To my surprise and even Luca's, it took about an hour to strip me of my fleece (an expert can shear 50 ewes in that time). The most sensitive bit of me, as he predicted, was the chest, which gave up the protective coat it has worn for the best part of four decades with extreme reluctance.
Also, when you're lying on your back you can see what's about to unfold. If I had been a spy and Luca had been trying to prise a confession, that's the moment I might have betrayed everyone back in the safe house.
Later, a woman who has regular waxings told me she always takes painkillers beforehand. It was a conversation I wished I'd had 24 hours earlier. Yet at no point did I regret doing it. And anyway the pain was fleeting. I had a vasectomy ten years ago and for days walked around like John Wayne after a month in the saddle. This was quite different.
I asked Luca whether my reaction was more or less wimpish than most men. "Probably more," he said, then added kindly: "But it's your first time. And you're a bit hairier than most men."
Not any more, I'm not.
After Luca had given me the post-waxing pep talk (no hot showers or exercise for 48 hours while the skin is fragile, to avoid irritation), he broke it to me that to keep smooth I would need it done again as soon as the re-growth is more than 1cm long, so the wax has something to cling to.
But when it does return, the hair will be thinner and finer. That sounds good to me.
Finally, I stepped out onto the streets of Covent Garden feeling not so much like a new man, but rather the prepubescent boy I was circa 1975.
It was startling to feel clothes on my skin in a way I haven't for decades. I hadn't realised my covering of torso hair had de-sensitised me, but it had. The next day, drying myself after a (cool) shower, it felt a bit like a mild form of sunburn or perhaps prickly heat.
But never mind what it was like for me; how would Jane react? I was under the duvet by the time she started getting ready for bed. I beckoned her over.
"What on earth are you doing?" she said. After all, it was a week night and our children were on the landing. When I whipped off the duvet, with as much ceremony as I could manage without trumpets, she shrieked and clapped her hand over her mouth, entirely lost for words.
Then she started laughing. When she had recovered her composure and I had explained what I had secretly done, she said: "You look like a really massive baby."
It wasn't the response I'd hoped for, but I knew it was born of approval. It's also nice to know I can still surprise her after 22 years of marriage, though what I'll do for my next transformative trick I'm not quite sure.
The children approved, too, I think, once they'd got over the shock of seeing their father - on every summer holiday one of the hairiest dads on the beach - rendered as hairless as the day he was born.
That was a few days ago. Now the hair has started growing back and it itches like fury. This morning I found myself unthinkingly rubbing my back against a door frame.
"You look like a horse scratching itself on a post," said Jane. So that's now a horse and a massive baby I've been compared to.
But I'll never get looks of horror on the beach again. So it's most definitely worth it.
- Daily Mail
