I’VE had a bit of a traumatic week; I’ve been de-bearded. For you pedants who’ll argue there’s no such word as de-bearded, there is now – I just made it up. My thanks, I think, to wee Sean of Cambridge Barbers who did the shearing, a video of which will follow on social media.
The beard coming off had nothing to do with our insane heatwave but everything to do with an incensed wife. She demanded a few months ago that I trim my already neat beard. Being a contrary type, I thought to myself, ‘You think this beard is long, wait ‘til I show you what a really long beard looks like’.
Then I caught sight of myself on The Blame Game, something I try to avoid, and realised I didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. I thought I resembled a Spartan from the film 300, but my wife argued I looked much more like Richard Harris in The Field. She kitted me out in an old hat and coat took a picture and even I had to admit the resemblance was striking.
I’d love to say I immediately shaved off the errant growth to appease the wife, but you’d know that was a lie; it only came off when it began to annoy me. One of the great advantages of having a beard was not having to shave. Those extra five minutes in the morning were pure paradise for a lazy hallion such as myself.
The only maintenance necessary when it was shorter was a weekly trim, but with the longer growth all that changed. I had to invest in beard oil just to keep the thing from exploding on my face, and then there was the constant battle to keep it out of my mouth. It’s not nice having face hair with every meal; I began to fear I might be the first human to cough up a hair ball.
Then came the night when the damn thing wakened me from a deep sleep. One of my moustache hairs decided, for no good reason, to make a break for freedom and instead of pointing down, as it had for years, sprung straight up into my nostril. I awoke, slapping my face, as I dreamt the hair up the nose was a massive ant crawling up my face.
Once I’d stopped screaming and the wife had stopped punching me, we worked out what happened and she detached the offending hair with a pair of tweezers; not pleasant. But that wasn’t the end of me being harassed by my facial hair. A few weeks after this incident I came home from work to be greeted by a distinct smell of burning. I enquired if anyone else smelt it, only to be met with blank stares.
I checked the house from loft to garage to try and discover the source of the smell, all to no avail. But the smell didn’t go away, the next morning it was there as soon as I woke and stayed with me most of the next day. What in God’s name could it be? I’d heard that people having a stroke sometimes smelt burning toast, so being a bit of a hypochondriac, I began poking my cheek to make sure it wasn’t going numb.
It took four days for the penny to drop. The expensive beard oil I’d bought had cedar wood in it, a refreshing potion to rub in of a morning. Unfortunately, whatever way it interacted with my face, by the end of the day the cedar wood smell had morphed into burning wood; I’d been smelling my own moustache.
So last weekend, when Sean deftly used a cut-throat razor to remove the last hair from my chin, I looked into his mirror and saw a face I hardly recognised. I looked at least five years younger and realised what takes a surgeon’s knife or Botox to do for a woman, the removal of a beard does for a man – I’d undergone a surgery-free face lift.
As my beard hair was being brushed up, I wish I’d been ecological and recycled it. I could for instance have lent it to Arlene Foster for her attendance at a GAA match last week. As she sat in the stand looking utterly mortified she wore a pair of Blues Brothers sunglasses that almost covered her whole face, I’ve no doubt she’d have been glad of my grey beard as added disguise.
