On shaving

A combination of sensitive skin, idleness and exposure to Indiana Jones as a role model at an impressionable age has left me with the firm belief that it’s quite acceptable to shave once or twice a week and, for the rest of the time, sport the sort of stubble usually seen abaze in a field in East Anglia. This is not a view shared by the rest of the household and a recent poll saw 50% of the occupants of the house firmly of the belief that it made me look ‘sinister’, ‘like a Pikey’ and, most cuttingly, ‘old’.

More pleasingly, it did result in the gift of a new shaving cream. Over the years I’ve tried just about every shaving cream known to man, and a few unknown ones on the basis that badger-fat has to be good for something. They have all been crap. This new stuff though, is fantastic, you walk away from the mirror feeling quite the torff and just effeminate smelling enough to arouse the damp curiosity of the ladies about your sexuality.

Even with the addition of this new soothing balm, there’s no getting away from the fact that shaving oneself is a ghastly business and an everyday waste of time. You wake up, shave and what have you done, what have you achieved. At most, you are back to how you looked this time yesterday morning. It’s woeful. Best result is that you shave off an actual beard and walk away from the mirror looking a little younger and a lot less like a communist agitator.

Being shaved, is another matter entirely. Shaving should be done with a cut throat razor, by somebody else. In a perfect world it is done by one’s man. When one is travelling it can be done by a young foreign girl. When one is on safari – and at no other time – it is permissible to be shaved by a friend. Or one’s wife.

A friend of mine recently got married in Sorrento, not far from Naples where the cut throat razor has, alas, all but passed into history now that the local thugs prefer to settle scores with guns and scooters. The morning of his wedding he went to get a haircut and a shave and, in broken Italian pantomimed what he wanted, hoping to God that the chap was not about to shave his head and give his beard a short back and sides. The Italian was an artist with the scissors and, when it came to the shave, it was right and proper – the hot towel to make the bristles soft, the cut throat razor wielded like a man who had learned the craft in the back-alleys of Naples and then, something a bit Turkish. The fellow inserted a lit cotton bud into my friends ear. This was, even by foreign standards, a bit off and my friend was just about to say something, most probably ‘Aggggggghhhhhhhh!’ when the bud was removed and the practice repeated on the other ear. Barely had my friend time to realise that the barber was taking a novel and somewhat psychotic approach to the removal of nuisance ear-tufts when he had a burning rag shoved up his nose. The stench of singed nostril hair was quickly covered by a splash of after shave lotion, explaining to some degree why foreign men always stink of the damned stuff. And my friend tottered out of the barbers slightly light-headed and wondering if he was being secretly filmed.

Frankly, that sounds like the ideal way to start the day. If, basically, your head has been set on fire before you’ve had your kippers, then you’re well based to face whatever trivia trials the remains of the day may wish to throw at you.

As for domestic shaving? It combines dull with dangerous. If you did something every day that left you bleeding now and again, you’d soon bloody well stop it. The whole industry is geared to making money out of misfortune, I’m sure the razor blade companies are in cahoots with the folk that make face balms, tissue paper and when it’s really bad, sticking plasters.