Hair care: the long and the short of it

PAV’S PATCH: TODAY marks four years of Pav’s Patch — round of applause please — and I’m going to dedicate this anniversary offering to a different kind of patch: facial hair.

We live in times when men seem compelled to remove every vestige of hair. Males seem compelled to have all their hair razored off and I have no idea why. Is it to look like a thug, to avoid combing, or to spend less at the barber’s? I don’t know.

In fact, I find it very strange that at the same time as some men are paying a small fortune to keep baldness at bay, others are spending a fiver to bring it on.

Added to this, the moustache has almost completely disappeared and beards seem to be the preserve of real-ale drinkers. I used to have a moustache — a ginger one would you believe? — but I had to remove it so that a woman I met wouldn’t be able to recognise me.

I’ve also had a couple of stabs at growing a beard, but with very little success. On both occasions it was on the mistaken assumption that I would be able to impress a girl, but it didn’t work. The beard came out in scratchy tufts while the women in question paid me less attention than they had before.

For one particular girl, despite my hatred of fairground rides, I went on the Revolution in Blackpool. She said that I’d be too scared and I have to admit that I really didn’t enjoy it — especially the bit when it goes backwards and I saw the tower, upside down.

Dragging myself off it, I staggered jelly-legged towards her and proudly presented her with my certificate. Far from kissing me, she said, “that’s nice,” and walked off. I got a similar reaction when I went on the waltzers with her. The things we do in the mad belief that girls will be impressed.

Anyway, a lot of countries try to control beards and haircuts. In Albania, the communist dictator Enver Hoxha banned beards as un-Marxist, even though Marx had one . . . and Engels, and Trotsky, and well, Lenin too.

In Iran, a man with an Afro was arrested because the baseej militia said it wasn’t just African, it was African American and so would put dreadful thoughts into the minds of youth.

Goatees were once banned in Turkmenistan, while in Taliban days you weren’t allowed to trim your beard in Afghanistan. And when sectarian violence was at its worst in Iraq, many barbers were murdered because their haircuts were deemed too western.

I leave the last word to my mate’s late grandad: “When it comes to haircuts, there’s only two weeks between a good ’un and a bad ’un.”