Facial Hair

It's that time of year again.  The weather is on the turn and men up and down the country are experimenting with things to keep their face warm.  Even my Dad has grown a beard. If the Long Suffering Husband experiments with facial hair again I might suggest a balaclava.

Pintrest is full of good ideas

 I can see the appeal of facial hair, really I can; I've always wanted to be able to grow a beard myself but they are just too prickly on the outside to live with.

My dad vowed he would never grow a beard again after the last attempt caused him to crash his car in 1979 but now, here he is over thirty years later looking a bit like Santa Claus.  He's had it professionally styled now to make him look a little more Paul Hollywood and a little less St Nick. My sister suggested it was beard art, which made me wonder if he had a little pirate skull and cross bones etched into it.

Beard growing doesn't last long for most men; they are either beard wearers by nature (probably due to their mother's choice of breakfast cereal while pregnant . I imagine porridge to make a clean shaven man and shredded wheat to make a bearded one.) or they're not but they will all experiment with a naked chin or a fully furred one.  Natural beard wearers can be quite fanatical. There is a Beard Liberation Front and a Handlebar Mousrache Society, who have been known to fall out, which surprises me, as on the formation of the BLF, its founder, Keith Flett said, "Beards are politically progressive. All the great revolutionary socialists had a beard. Stalin had a moustache." Mr Flett is quite pleased about Jeremy Corbyn's election as the leader of the Labour Party and is also rather interested in beer. (www.kmflett.wordpress.com) The two seem to go together but are not mutually exclusive because if they were my Dad would have to have risked further car crashes and grown a beard years ago. 

When these non natural beard wearers finally decide to shave they will inevitably experiment with a moustache for a few days, hours or seconds. The time their moustache lasts is inversely proportional to the number of women/teenagers in the house. Moustaches are funny, which is why Movember is so successful. 

Keeping a moustache for a while could entitle a man to qualify for membership to the handlebar club, providing their moustache has 'graspable extremities' and they could meet in The Windsor Castle pub on the first Friday of every month to drink beer (even moustache wearers are fond of beer)

However, most men do not join this elite group but briefly experiment with a style that they know they will never be able to wear in public, no matter how well it suits them. This is the toothbrush moustache. 

"Go and shave that thing off at once!" their loved ones will shout, "You look like Hitler."

"I was thinking I looked more like Chaplin or even Oliver Hardy," they say hopefully. 

Hitler!  Blooming Hitler. Ruining things for people: vegetarianism, the Swazstiker, Nietzsche, the first verse of the German National anthem. Even the name. The LSH had an uncle Dolph, which I naively wondered was short for dolphin. He nearly choked and although he never actually said his full first name aloud he did say that he was sad that he hadn't been able to pass his family name down the generations, as it had been ruined by one moustachioed man. 

Richard Herring, in his radio 4 series 'Objective' has suggested that we reclaim this item of face furniture back from the fuhrer. He actually left the house with his and while he was expecting to be beaten up most people just politely laughed at him behind his back. He blames this on the fact that it was a Hitler moustache but I suspect that all moustaches are now items of ridicule. You never see a pencil moustache and as far as I know Erol Flynn never successfully ordered the killing of 6 million Jews and although Elgar knew how to write music to stretch all his violin pupils I don't think he can be blamed for the fact that we don't see fluffy caterpillars residing under people's noses.

As funny as they are, I am still a bit jealous that I can't grow one.