Beards- From George Michael to ZZ Top (via Garry Birtles) in five easy stages

Last year we went on holiday to France, and I came back with an unusual souvenir, in the form of a beard. At first it was an almost imperceptible, stubbly affair which was surprisingly well received by people back home, one of whom called my new hirsute appearance 'the European college lecturer look'. This compliment (if indeed it was meant as one) greatly pleased me, and I was only slightly less enamoured a week or so later to be likened to the one-time Manchester United forward Garry Birtles. But as the weeks without shaving went by, the comparisons became less favourable, and when my mate Dan gave me the epithet 'Sutty' in reference to Peter Sutcliffe, AKA the Yorkshire Ripper, I knew the time for action had come. One visit to the electrical grooming section of Boots the Chemist later, and for the outlay of £24.99, I was the proud owner of a battery-powered Babyliss beard trimming device.

I say 'the proud owner', but in fact the Babyliss thing proved to be a bit on the useless side. For a start, it advertised having five settings for length of beard, but what it didn't tell you was that they could have been called:

1- George Michael
2- Jimmy Hill
3- David Bellamy
4- Fidel Castro
5- the really mad-looking one out of ZZ Top.

Posessing neither facial hair down to my ankles nor a bright red guitar in the shape of an axe, setting five was pretty much useless to me- in fact I was looking at George Michael or nothing. I could live with this, but then the Babyliss beard machine started to get temperamental, and would threaten to pack up altogether on you mid-session, leaving you with the sort of comically uneven look not seen since that episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye decides to shave the other one's moustache off in his sleep for a laugh. Unless it was Hawkeye who had the moustache, I can't remember. Whatever, it was the type of appearance you can get away with, maybe, if you are a hard-working, hard-partying, and above all fictional frontline military medic in the Korean War, but is less likely to go down well in a departmental meeting in a present-day central Manchester sales office. And the alternative- banging the infernal machine repeatedly against something hard in order to rouse the sullen batteries up enough to provide your face with the clumpily-hacked-at look of a hurriedly-mown lawn, wasn't exactly satisfactory either. Quite frankly, it was getting to the stage where I was going to start being compared unfavourably to badly-groomed serial killers again- so today I made a repeat visit to Boots, and came back with a replacement beard machine, this time manufactured by the good people at Phillips.

The Philishave machine, I was assured by the nice lady behind the counter (who rather worryingly appeared to have no beard at all but did have a very persuasive sales manner) benefitted from no less than nine settings, and even the ninth would have me looking no shaggier than a circa-1976 Jimmy Hill. And she was as good as her word- I have just completed my first shave with my new machine, and, if I say so myself, I am looking just a little European college-lectureresque again. It is all you will be able to do, in fact, to stop me striking up a Gauloise and holding forth at length on the nature of Existentialism to the first group of nineteen-year-olds I can muster.

Now, if I can just remember to get the machine out again before the onset of Garry Birtles (or Heaven forfend, Peter Sutcliffe) I think I may just have got this beard thing worked out at last. But I do think that next time I go to France I will come back with a normal souvenir from an Hypermarche, instead of one stuck to my face. These continental 'beard' affairs are all very well for Johnny Foreigner you know, but bring them back to Blighty, and they can be a bit more damned trouble than they're worth.

Comments

[Ben]

Christ, I don't know how many regular readers you have, but you deserve a lot more! Another fine post.

I find myself experimenting with facial hair a lot these days, mainly because I'm too lazy to shave and at present I can get away without doing it (ie I don't have a job). I know what you mean about getting labelled though - at one point when I had about two weeks worth of patchy growth, a friend asked me if I'd just got off a Russian submarine...

[Clint]

There are three members of ZZ Top. Two have enormous beards. The other one hasn't. The one without the beard is called Frank Beard. Weird or what?

[jonathan]

Well I have at least... several regular readers Ben- a small but select group. Thank you again for your kind comments..

Hello Clint and welcome to Crinklybee! I had not seen the name Frank Beard since the pages of Smash Hits in about 1985. And what a fine name it is too.