As the late, great, furiously bigoted children’s writer Roald Dahl once aphorised: “What a lot of hairy-faced men there are about nowadays – when a man grows hair on his face, it shows he has something to hide.” Or a woman for that matter – although in the latter case, the disguise is usually involuntary, and depilated in short order.
Given his antisemitism, and antipathy towards all skins darker than his pasty own, Dahl’s objection to beards might have been part and parcel; saving this: no one hides the fact that he’s a Jew or a Muslim – let alone that he’s of African or Asian heritage – by growing a beard. On the contrary, a beard tends to be associated with religiosity in all the oppressively patriarchal Abrahamic faiths – while if you were black, you’d have to have blond fur, not a beard, to evade the racist gaze.
I wasn’t trying to hide something by growing a beard; I confess: it really is too late in the day for that sort of effacement on my part. No: I still cherished – even at my advanced years – pathetic notions of cutting a dash with exaggerated mustachios and dapper little goatee assemblage, like my great literary hero, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne.
Two confidantes scuppered this from opposite edges of the razor: bluntly, my youngest told me– well, he didn’t just tell me, he signalled to me his dissension by sketching a handlebar moustache shape in the air with his finger, while saying, “Dad, how could you have a fancy beard, when you know I lived my entire childhood under the curse of this sign?”
Which is true enough: the early 2000s were a time when British men – presumably in line with their increasing emasculation, as they marched confidently towards that great political gelding, Brexit – took to growing beards and moustaches of all kinds with showy abandon. Where once there were tobacconists and bookies, salons sprang into being dedicated to the most exaggerated and complex sculpting of male facial hair.
In the tonsorial culture of that time, my proposed Van Dyck would have been positively pedestrian – indeed, it would still, if I were allowed to have it. But I took his point to heart: Charles Mackay, the author of that great compendium of human folly, the title of which speaks for all of us, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, while being perfectly happy to discuss all manner of aberrant behaviours, leaves hair well alone; remarking that in all ages and all cultures there have been both passionate partisans of one style or another, and equally violent opponents; and that neither party had any just cause whatsoever, or even aesthetic argument.
I do remember finding the little goatee men of the early 1990s, clip-clopping about (for some reason those who affected these chin-borne divots also often rode racing cycles and wore shoes equipped with click-on-cleats), unbelievably annoying – but if this recollection of a childhood over which clippers cast a shadow was an inhibition, an old friend gave positive encouragement. I hadn’t seen Ranjan for well over a year – and there he was with the most extravagant beard! Big and bushy enough to hide the pontification proboscises of a myriad of patriarchs.
I was impressed – and Ranjan isn’t a Sikh, so there seemed no direct religious impulse for this cascade of keratin. Being a beardie neophyte, I’d been nervously having mine clipped for the first few weeks of its nativity – first by some Kurds with a bizarre neo-Victorian salon in North Clapham, then by Dino in Little Nigeria, in East Peckham. What, I asked Ranjan, was the secret of his beard’s magnificence? Did he have some regime of unguents accompanied by judicious trimming?
No, he assured me, he did nothing to his beard – absolutely nothing: simply let it grow. And yes, gentle – and quite possibly downy-cheeked – reader, I have decided to follow his path. But then you’d expect nothing more of Multicultural Man, who now strides the streets of Sarf London dressed in North African clothes and sporting a bushy beard beneath his prominent nose.
St Paul’s apostolate was – as a Jew who had once persecuted gentiles – to carry the message of Christianity to them; mine is to somehow reconcile the two most antipathetic faith communities of London in the contours of my own… face.
So screw you, Dahl: far from having anything to hide – this interfaith face is in plain sight.
