The other day I was groping blearily into my holiday washbag in search of the toothpaste, when I managed to slice the top of my finger, salami-style, on one of my ancient rusty Bic razors.
I raged. I cursed. Not for the first time I asked – why me? Why us? Why shaving?
Why has the Almighty condemned the entire male sex to wear facial hair, this pointless and unsightly excrescence that must be harvested daily with unhygienic nostril-chopping bits of plastic and steel?
And what possible evolutionary function, in any case, does the human beard perform?
When it came to the survival of the fittest, I could see the need for a decent pair of eyes, or ears, a good set of teeth. But what the hell was the use of a moustache?
Is a hairy face supposed to keep you warm? Nonsense. Is this fungus supposed to be camouflage – to allow primitive male humanoids to lurk behind bushes, in the hope of ambushing some myopic early rhinoceros?
Is the beard an attempt to disguise us from our enemies, human or animal? Again, I simply can’t believe that was what Nature intended. It’s a useless disguise, and in the great struggle of life it has always seemed to me that abundant facial hair is a positive hindrance, a downright health hazard.
The beard is a highly vulnerable point of the human anatomy, another place for your enemy to grip while he tries to decapitate you. It’s another home for the lethal bacteria that begin by feasting on the inevitable and ineradicable deposits of marmalade and egg yolk.
‘I was beginning to look more and more like some homeless hermit,’ writes Boris Johnson (pictured on holiday with his daughter Romy)
In a world that relies ever more on the speed and power of your verbal communication, a beard just makes you mumble incoherently. It makes you sound drunk, or perhaps as if you have had a stroke. So why do some people wear them, and what do other people see in them?
That was my thinking, at any rate, until we arrived on holiday in Greece. And then, having cut my finger on the razor blade, I decided to try an experiment.
I wouldn’t say that I grew a beard. That is too active, too transitive an expression for what happened. It’s like saying that I tried to grow roses or prize-winning marrows. Actually, I made no effort whatever.
The beard just grew, and I allowed it to grow. After a day or so it was the kind of stubbly growth you might cultivate before a big rugby match, so that when the opposing prop tries to gouge out your eyes in the scrum you can sandpaper his face with your chin.
After a week, though, it was starting to look pretty unkempt. What the hell, I thought: we are on holiday. No one is going to notice.
After two weeks the ugly facts were staring at me from the mirror: bushy, springy white hairs all over my chin and jowls. On my lip – ginger! A thick gingery carpet, sprinkled with white and even black (eh? where does that come from?)
It looked like road-kill, the tragic pelt of some small, crushed rodent. It was appalling. It had to go. By now the hair was so profuse that I thought the Bic wouldn’t do the job.
I told my wife that I was going in search of the local barber – and it was then that I got the shocking news that helps explain the mystery with which we began, the mystery of the beard.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘I rather like it.’
Really? I said, with a mixture of bafflement and vanity, and stared again in the mirror.
It was then, of course, that it hit me, and at last I understood the evolutionary function of male facial hair. It’s useless; it’s pointless; it doesn’t do you a blind bit of practical good, except that it loudly and clearly signals your gender to the opposite sex.
It is a fact that women cannot grow beards. Wait, as soon as I wrote that sentence, I realised how potentially offensive it was. Let me clarify by saying that I am sure that over the years there have been a small number of women, highly attractive in other respects, who have exhibited their beards in circuses and so on.
Then these days there are plainly at least some men who identify as women who are capable of growing luxuriant beards. Poor old Keir Starmer would probably insist on calling them women even if they had beards like Karl Marx.
But if I may briefly trample on all these sensitivities and complexities, it is still true – broadly speaking – that only men can grow beards, and that is the whole point. That is why beards are there.
They are like the proboscis of the male elephant seal or the big blue bottom of the male mandrill. They are objectively ridiculous. They look absurd, unless of course you happen to be a female elephant seal or a female mandrill. For these females, the effect is entirely different.
The more pronounced the proboscis, the bluer the bottom – the deeper the arousal of the opposite sex. That is why millions of years of evolution have left us men with so much otherwise redundant hair on our faces – or at least, I can’t think of a better explanation.
Darwin himself sported a fine beard
And so, the blissful Greek days went by, and the beard grew more extreme, and so did my confusion. Was this making me genuinely more attractive to my wife, as she had seemed initially to say? In which case, frankly, I was all for it.
Or was it now looking ridiculous? On the last day of the holiday, I could take it no more. Carrie’s compliments had started, I thought, to dry up. I began to feel I wasn’t looking like George Clooney at all.
I was beginning to look more and more like some homeless hermit – a victim of Sadiq Khan’s London, the kind of chap you see lying in a sleeping bag with a can of extra strong cider.
By now, I had no time to go to the village and find the barber – you know the one who says he shaves all the men who do not shave themselves, forcing us to ask whether he shaves himself, because if he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does.
Well, I was facing an even bigger paradox than Bertrand Russell! My beard was both an evolutionary advantage, in that it (allegedly) made me more attractive to my wife. And yet it also made me look so scruffy and unprofessional that it would do me serious economic damage – and therefore make me considerably less attractive to Carrie!
Aargh! What to do?
The plane home was leaving in a few hours. I had meetings. I had to look at least sane. Reaching into the washbag, got the Bic, lathered on some soap, and to my amazement the old razor reaped the lot – beard, moustache, sideboards and all – in about three minutes flat.
I can’t tell you how much better I felt. But at least I now know why Nature has decreed that men should have beards. It’s Darwinian. I mean, look at old Darwin himself.
