Blame always in the last place you want to look

If there is anyone who should shoulder the blame, it is me.

Invariably that’s what you find with blame, even though it’s often the last place you look.

The blame that is mine to shoulder is my lack of a sharp razor. Or, from another perspective, an abundance of blunt razors. In this instance, it’s a stroke of luck for me that I am in the fortunate position of having less facial hair than your average 5-year-old boy and so I am able to get away with shaving just once a week.

But for about three months now even this weekly facial trim, that should be as quick and as easy as sliding a spoon through custard, has become something more akin to chopping wood with a piece of toast.

The solution to this dilemma is incredibly simple. In theory I could just go to the shop and buy a new razor. In practice, as in blame, things are not that easy.

Razors are perhaps the most complicated thing a man is ever expected to purchase on a regular basis. There is a dizzying array of choices for an item that despite differences in shape, colour and feel, does exactly the same thing.

There are four bladed ones that vibrate and are so expensive you have to add them to your home and contents insurance plan. There are single bladed ones that are so cheap you could use one a day for the rest of your life and still get change from $100.

And in between there are 37 other kinds that all promise varying degreess of happiness and manly handsomeness.

Invariably I go for the middle of the range. I don’t want to be the chump who spends their child’s inheritance on an over-engineered face shaving stick but neither do I want to be the guy walking around with blood red bits of toilet paper on my sliced up chin because I was too cheap to buy something half decent. That I am even in this position of having to worry about what blades to buy is, as I have said, my own fault. But were I not the type of man to take responsibility for my position in life I could just as easily blame of Ghengis Kahn.

If you go back far enough you can blame the Great Kahn for all manner of things, quite apart from the millions of dead people he left in his wake. International trade, paper money, religious tolerance - that’s all him. And, of course, my pathetic beard.

If he hadn’t been such an overwhelmingly successful conqueror I would probably right now be sporting a fashionable bushy mop of facial hair that made women swoon and men with axes stop and stare. More importantly it wouldn’t need shaving. Except I don’t have such a beard.

Because while the Great Kahn and his Mongol people have been accused of many things in their time, the one thing no one ever accused them of as they were conquering, slaying and impregnating my ancestors in Russia, was thick and luxurious facial hair.

Their beards were generally thin and wispy and ridiculous. They had the sort of facial hair you might see on a teenager who had flatly refused to shave off their first sproutings of fluff. It was embarrassing. And they passed this genetic embarrassment onto my family line, which means I have no chance of ever having a beard. Bastards.

Aside from the Great Kahn I also have King Gillette up my sleeve were I so inclined to blame someone other than myself. He was the idiot who came up with the idea of cheap stamped blades and so ushered in the era of disposable razors that so torment me now.

If not King then there is always Adam Smith, one of the founding fathers of the modern capitalist societies that enable the creation of such a plethora of choices in consumer goods. And if not Adam Smith there is that other tinkerer Roger Douglas, the man who ruined the 1980s while turning New Zealand into a fantasy land of cheap imports.

But in the end this really does take us further and further away from the true culprit behind all my woes, big, small, important and pathetic.

As I have said before, the person you really should be blaming is the one looking back at you in the mirror. Which really is the hardest of all people to blame.

And so you shouldn’t. After all, you didn’t choose to be here and so anything that happens to you is really no one else’s fault but your parents.

So thanks a lot Mum and thanks a lot Dad. The only question now is which one of you is getting me some razor blades?