But last night as I shaved I made an effort to remember them. And here they are, a string of arbitrary thoughts evoked by shaving.
I don’t pretend that they cohere.
In the fifth form we went on football tour. I was the goalkeeper. We stayed in a run-down hotel with sinks in the rooms.
I still have a black-and-white photo, posing with a towel around my waist and arms raised in the boxer’s pose to show off the biceps of adolescence.
Most of the other boys shaved. I had no need to but I bought a disposable razor from the chemist’s and a can of foam.
Next morning at the sink with roommates watching I gave myself a Santa’s beard of foam and then went at it with the razor, as if it were my everyday routine.
It was Brian Coverdale, the swarthy inside right, who pointed out that it might help if I removed the plastic safety guard.
My father had a shaving brush. I understood it to be made of badger hair. I didn’t wonder then but wonder now about that badger.
Had it been wild or are there badger farms? And if there are, do badgers have to die that men may shave or are there badger-shearing gangs? Someone must know.
My father used a chunky metal razor. When you twisted its stem a pair of caps arose, like a beetle’s wing casings, to expose the blade.
That blade was a single metal sliver, lethal on either side. Laid flat upon a surface it was impossible to pick up.
When young I heard a story of an apple in a shop that had been laced with razor blades like that. I shuddered at the mental image, shudder now. It seemed to me the apogee of evil. Perhaps it was a myth.
For my 21st birthday, my mother gave me an electric razor. It was made by Ronson and came in a plush case — a fitting gift for a son who had come to man’s estate.
But I hadn’t. I shaved little more than once a week and the electric razor was no good to me. It snatched at the fine hairs on my chin instead of cutting them.
But still I lugged the case around with me for several years because to dump it or to sell it would have been ungrateful. Quite how and when I ditched the thing eventually I don’t recall, but time makes all things possible.
My first day teaching at a school in Canada. It was 1982 and I was 25.
A huge American car pulled up in the quad. The drawling, fat, moustachioed driver ordered me to show his son around while he, the father, went to find a teacher. "Yes, sir," I said.
Once in Vancouver and once in Dubai I paid to be shaved. Both barbers were Indian. And both used a cut-throat razor, mainly, I suspect, for effect. I enjoyed the smother of hot towels, the pampering, surrendering to expertise. But neither shave was closer than the one I give myself.
Larkin wrote of shaving on dark mornings and confronting in the mirror the "bestial visor, bent in by the blows of what happened to happen".
My visor is as bent as any but I am spared the sight. I shave in the shower.
Two minutes and the steam has softened the bristles, obviating the need for badger. A smear of gel from an aerosol then I tilt the neck to tauten the skin.
When I am done I check the whole for smoothness with my fingers. And always there’s a little ring of bristles at the base of the neck which I remove with a few extra downward strokes.
It is as if there is a point where the direction of hair growth changes, that marks the juncture between body and head. The Jekyll and Hyde Line, perhaps, the Man and Beast.
And musing thus, I rinsed the blade and hung it on the little hook I have installed for just that purpose and calculated that I’ve shaved my face perhaps 5000 times.
And of those shaves, this was the first to have its unique random slew of thoughts and memories recorded.
And it will be the last. Thank you for coming along.
— Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
