A billion bristles are rustling on chins left lazing in lockdown
Acelebrated picture from the 19th century shows Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery, and his colleagues doing something terrible to a patient etherised upon a table. A carbolic spray makes the operation safe. Every one of the men hauling and cutting wears face foliage – beardage.
Lister generally went in for the side-fuzz known from the 1850s as Dundreary whiskers, made fashionable by a character in the hit play Our American Cousin. (Abraham Lincoln was watching this farce when he was assassinated – surely another indication of the health and safety risks of facial hair.)
Lister would have had something to chew on this week when doctors bravely volunteering to do what’s needed for coronavirus patients were handed shaving kits as they signed up. It’s because beards spoil the seal between masks known as FFP3 and the skin. Ordinarily, to expect shaving would be an outrageous example of everyday pogonophobia – a hate crime against beardies.
Yet men who for 20 or 30 years had never seen their face in the mirror without the dignified covering of nature’s muffler have selflessly taken up scissors and razor. It is not to be underestimated. For men not afflicted with the facial fidgets – like David Beckham, who grows and mows facial designs as though he were using a Bazooka Joe instant tattoo transfer – beards are not just for Christmas. Martial figures, like the Cid of Spain, saw the beard as an emblem of honour; touch it and you’d lose your head. That seems reasonable.
And health chiefs are aware of the danger of religious discrimination in expecting beardlessness. Leaving the beard and hair uncut is kesh, one of the five Ks of Sikhism. Some Sikhs have preferred to die rather than cut their locks. Many
Orthodox Jews recoil from the use of a razor, though, with the casuistry embraced by lovers of law, some allow an electric shaver as long as it acts as scissors would, and not like a razor edge.
Peace to all such. I hope they find a way. My real gripe is with the widespread sprouting of stubble and careless beards through inertia. Just as it is no surprise now to glimpse an unmade bed behind a television talking head seen by Zoomery at home, so viewers are confronted with bristling patches of grey and ginger on talking chins. You can hear it rustle on the mike sometimes, like a cockroach in a bag of crisps.
This matters because, after the Plague Year, the world will be remade, and the habits we’ve all picked up will determine how well it is refashioned. Some strive to insert the thin end of their ideology now, in order to make Britain more bossily state-controlled in future. But the unspoken ways of behaviour are the ones that really determine national culture.
No one uses coins now for fear of germs. Will cash come back? No one much dresses differently for work now, slopping about in tops and bottoms. Will smart dresses and suits return? This is the territory into which accidental beardism is thrusting its spring growth, like bindweed between the decking.
I have a bearded dog in this fight. I last shaved my beard in 1976, after hearing an emotional performance of some Elgar. Little did I think, upon resuming its growth, that it could ever become fashionable. To see pogonotrophy creep on to a million chins by inadvertence is like leaving the carpets unvacuumed for the duration.