23 February 2017
Beards
Shaping the whiskers.
By Chin Chin
It is said that great sculptors will spend days looking at a piece of marble before they make the first cut. An inch to the right and Venus will be missing a nose. An inch to the left and the curve of her body will be marred forever. It is mistakes of this sort which account for classical statuary missing so many limbs, but anyway the first chink of the hammer must always be a nervous moment. There are similar tensions too when a great diamond is cut, and I have heard it said that when the Koh-i-Noor was remodelled in 1852 the craftsman fainted with relief on seeing that his initial stroke was perfect. Well, you can see his point. With both Prince Albert and the Duke of Wellington in charge of operations it would have been a tad embarrassing to have had to tell them that Queen Victoria now owned a large number of gravel-like stones.
But the problem is not restricted to great artists dealing with pieces of public importance. In fact I am suffering from a similar uncertainty myself. How exactly should I trim my beard?
It all started when I went to Russia in the very early years of this century. I was to spend some couple of weeks in the country and I really didn’t know very much about the language. Actually I had tried studying it at school but gave it up well short of any academic qualification with only one usable expression to my credit. That was “eto vitrazh” meaning “this is a stained glass window”. That is undoubtedly a useful phrase but, although I spent many hours standing about in cathedrals, monasteries and the like waiting for new groups of tourists in front of whom I could exhibit my linguistic accomplishment, I never felt that I had achieved the true object of the tourist, to pass myself off as a local. Something else was needed and it was clear from the failure of my earlier efforts that it would be fruitless to try to master more of the language. So what did that leave? Something essentially Russian. Obviously a beard.
I have no idea whether the luxuriant growth which I then developed was convincing to Russian eyes but it went down very well with my family, so much so that they wanted me to try again. I was against it myself. Beards may look very impressive on other people but I have never liked the view from the inside. Nevertheless I said that I would grow anothr beard when I was next abroad for long enough to do the project justice. That turns out to be for a period of almost 3 months.
The first stage of beard-growing is an easy if essentially negative process. You simply stop shaving, and the beard (rather like those cress seeds which you put on pottery hedgehogs) grows all by itself. So far so good. For the first few days people assume that you have been partying all week and have not been home. Just after that they assume that you are becoming a hipster. Then you go through a number of stages. There is the “maybe a sensitive skin makes it difficult for him to shave” stage, the “playing a rat in the local pantomime” stage, and then the “growing a beard but too mean to pay a barber to shape it” stage. It is then, when you could pass for WG Grace without the cricket, that your mind turns to sculpting your facial hair into something a little more edifying and you put the word “beards” into Google.
It is extraordinary what you find. Apart from discovering that the world is full of people sporting beards of the most elegant appearance, you learned that a “bag of beards” was among the detritus cleared up after the Glastonbury music festival. A bag of beards? Presumably they are all false ones. Are there people who change their beard every day as they run from their creditors or perhaps the agents of North Korea? Is it something more sinister than that? Also amongst the rubbish were sex toys and a statue of a naked man. Just where had those beards been? You might catch the nastiest disease if you picked one up and put it on.
Even more confusing, however, is the choice of beard style revealed by your search and here you need to fit your facial hair to your own self image. Do you see yourself as Coeur de Lion, the great Plantagenet warrior who combined military skill with the sense to avoid capturing Jerusalem with an army which had vowed to stay together until that was done? If so, a full but clipped beard is for you. Still, you will need a horse and a sword as well if you are to stand comparison with the magnificent statue in Parliament Square. Are you, on the other hand, more a man of the pen? Perhaps then a René Descartes beard with a small tuft under the bottom lip in counterpoise to the thin black moustache above. Then again, something more religious might suit. We do not know what sort of beard Christ wore but lots of people have had a guess, and if that is going too far, what about a lesser religious figure such as Rowan Williams? A fine old testament beard there although to do it justice in modern times you probably need a mitre.
But then you might prefer something more conceptual rather than historical, a full Sir Jasper, for example, sharply pointed and supporting a moustache with curling ends. Just the thing for a little seduction and card-sharping. There are lots of others to choose from and I was thinking of the possibilities as I crossed the road on the way to the barbers. That may be why I didn’t see the cyclist who had to slam on his brakes and nearly fell into the gutter. I had expected some abuse but when he saw my beard his expression softened:
“Never mind, old timer,” he said, “just keep more of an eye out next time.”
“Old timer!” That did it. I walked into the barber’s shop and told him to shave the damned thing off.
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