A lot of people make ridiculous new year’s resolutions which they can’t keep.
Personally, I’m giving up the sauce for January.
Thus, because it’s so cold, and we need to occasionally shelter in pubs to get out of the freezing temperatures, the next LEGCC run will probably be in early February.
My wife walks a few steps behind me in shame when we go out and my two-year-old son points and laughs at me at home. Why? I’m growing a moustache.
As a magazine editor I work in a “creative” environment. One is not obliged to wear a suit, nor is it obligatory to shave. I work with colleagues sporting Travis Bickle Mohicans (that’s on a girl) and Led Zeppelin circa ‘69 beards (that’s not). Multiple piercings, neck tattoos… anything goes in the multi-media world of boho Soho.
But now, with my moustache, it appears that I have gone a step too far. In a world in which 18-year-olds from the summer of punk are now 50, it’s hard to shock anyone, but growing a moustache is just so wrong that it is almost the last true act of rebellion you can make. People my own age have been genuinely shocked by my burgeoning moustache.
But if there were no pain, there would be no gain. I’m growing it for charity and no one’s going to give you money to do something that would actually enhance your physical appearance, and the “mo” is the most loathed, distrusted and ridiculed of all the facial hair forms. But this is “Movember”: an idea that started in Australia and has spread around the globe – including Canada, the US, New Zealand, Ireland – in which men grow moustaches to raise money for men’s health issues. Since it began as a formal charity in 2004, Movember has raised over £13 million globally, “increasing awareness of prostate cancer, and continuously working to change the attitude men have about their health.”
The rules are simple: at the beginning of the month, men must register clean shaven. The rest of the month you must grow your moustache. There must be no cheating – and by that we mean growing a bit of a beard and then shaving it into a moustache for one day at the end of the month. We’ve all done it – you grow a particularly long crop of stubble on holiday and then when you’re shaving it off you leave the top lip to see what you might look like with a moustache. But you don’t leave it very long, because you look daft. And that’s the point, we have to look like idiots for the whole month to collect our sponsorship money.
And there are so many ways in which to manifest your moustache. There’s the “spiv” look, as modelled by Private Joe Walker of Dad’s Army, in which the moustache is shaved down to a meagre line just over the top lip. This look had a renaissance in the Eighties with Eddie Murphy, but is generally frowned upon because it’s seen as a bit of a cop-out.
To really get noticed, though, the moustache should be full, bushy and proud, lending the wearer a military-type demeanour like that worn by Brit artist and eccentric Billy Childish. It’s the kind of look that harks back to washing yourself with a flannel at the sink in unheated houses, itchy tweed and bad teeth. Famously seen on the Lord Kitchener of Khartoum “Your Country Needs You” recruiting poster of 1915, the military “handlebar” look was reprised by The Beatles on their 1966 album “Abbey Road” (which came with a free cut-out moustache).
The most acceptable for modern times is the Morgan Spurlock-type “trucker” look, which goes well when teamed with a baseball hat and Carhartt-type functional workwear. It’s acceptable because it’s almost trendy in a retro way (63-year-old Motorhead frontman Lemmy has been sporting this look for years albeit framed by a bushy set of sideburns that join the whole ensemble together). The “trucker” is not solely the preserve of Americans and Brit wannabes though – it graced the top lip of Polish trade unionist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa. It remains on Lech’s face to this day – in fact the moustache is him.
Sadly, it’s not just heroes that grow moustaches, they attract their fair share of villains too. And there’s something about a moustachioed man that is not to be trusted. In Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood’s character Blondie (the good) wears a stubbly beard whereas his nemesis Angel Eyes, played by a suitably sinister Lee Van Cleef, has a moustache. Perhaps the distrust has to do with vanity – a moustache involves a certain amount of grooming and shaping, and thinking of a man doing this in the mirror in the morning instantly renders him as a dubious “bad hat”.
There’s something about the moustache that attracts the power-hungry, the megalomaniacs and the dictators. Most obvious is Adolf Hitler, whose distinctive black strip began as a bushy Bavarian number (think Lech Walesa in Lederhosen) but had to be trimmed at the sides to fit inside a gas mask. His Most Supreme High Lordship Excellency of the 22nd Electoral Battlefleet’s Farmers Superior Alliance of Zimbabwe, or Robert Mugabe, has taken the minimal mo a stage further and has a thin vertical strip of hair covering the philtrum (groove underneath your nose). It’s almost a “Brazilian” for the face.
The list of bad guys with mos just goes on, from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. But then the good guys have them too: Albert Einstein, Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Salvador Dali, Richard Pryor, Charles Bronson, so perhaps it’s not all bad with a mo.
Now, as I ride the tube to work, I look at men with moustaches. But not too intently, and especially not when I’m wearing my leather motorcycle trousers. It’s become a game, guessing which ones are doing it for charity (usually the younger ones) and those whose top lip coverage is more of a lifestyle choice.
Sometimes you hear of people having some huge disfiguring wart or mole removed and actually mourning its loss. I can see what they go through, because now I’m perversely enjoying my mo. I find myself stroking it while thinking. I may miss it. Of course, when I’m feeling weak or have just been laughed at too much, I feel my hand reaching for the razor. But this must not happen before the end of November. I think of the facts: 35,000 men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer and about 10,000 men die from of the disease annually. A British man has a 1 in 11 lifetime risk of developing prostate cancer. So it’s probably worth making a fool of myself for another couple of weeks, isn’t it?
Find out more about Movember at http://uk.movember.com
