GROWING A BEARD

The other day I accidentally knocked my electric beard trimmer into the bath. It had glugged its way to the bottom before I fished it out with a soapy hand.

Now I'm a quick-thinking sort of chap, so I wrapped it in a towel like a baby, smoothed it dry and then leapt purposefully into the kitchen. Then I wedged it in a tub of rice.

It works with phones, I reassured myself, maybe the rice will simply absorb the water from the inner-working parts, like Superman inhaling poisonous gas or swallowing a bomb in the middle of Metropolis?

Well, it turned out that my super-long-grain-basmati was less 'super' than I'd expected. It didn't work; the trimmer buzzed like a dying bumblebee, and then spluttered out.

So it's back to the young-santa look for me for a while - or perhaps closer, Evan Baxter halfway through Evan Almighty when God won't let him shave for cinematographic and narrative reasons.

I wonder how beards came to be associated with holy men? Even Jedi masters 'grow strong' in the force it seems. Back in Bible times, I suppose men had beards because shaving was very difficult, rather than it being a sort of symbol of wisdom. Yet holiness ought to be all about discipline, surely? In many ways, being cleanly shaven ought to be more like it. Do the difficult, daily thing, rather than lazily letting all that unsightly hair spring unkemptly out of your chin.

I also wonder whether women know exactly what it feels like to wear a beard. I bet they can imagine it: it'd be just like them to be able to imagine it - and far better than we can imagine what it's like to have a tiny human living inside you, or other... stuff.

Let's get off this subject.

Beards aren't really a symbol of wisdom. They're a symbol that we haven't shaved, or that we'd like to keep warm during the Crimean War, or that we're about to open a juice-bar in Shoreditch.

And while, in the next few days, I will probably start to look like I belong tending the lamp in a windswept lighthouse, I should probably remember that due to a freak accident, my beard-trimmer needs replacing, and contrary to the mirror, I'm not auditioning for a part as Grizzly Adams.

One thing did become abundantly clear though while cooking. It's very hard to pick tiny beard hairs out of a massive tub of rice.

I threw it away.