You know what it is like: sometimes the question is more of a surprise than the answers it provokes.  Joy is almost always found in unexpected answers to mundane questions, but just occasionally you are forced to ask yourself a question, having absolutely no idea of what your answer might be.  In short, you catch yourself completely off-balance…

I was staring into the mirror this very morning when such a question occurred to me.  I would like to claim differently, but it was nothing profound: no ‘who am I really?’, no ‘where are we going’ or ‘what’s it all about?’  It was a little more intimate than that (but fret not, still above shoulder height).  I was standing, not for the first time, with beard trimmer in hand, trimming guard at feet and a broad swathe of semi-exposed skin etched across my face when the question dropped into my consciousness like an Alka Seltzer into a glass of water.  “How attached am I to this beard?”

Obviously I did not mean in a physical sense: this thing grows out of my face, it is not stuck there with wig adhesive.  I do not fear going out in a stiff breeze lest I find myself somewhat less hirsute than when I left home.  The beard is irrevocably part of me and that is where my problem lies.

I can’t actually say that I like the beard any more than I like the triple chin that it hides, my nose or my wonky cheekbone; it is simply part of me and, without it, my face is not my own.  It belongs to a fat blancmange.  I am Mr Potato Head with asymmetrically inserted features.

So, is the beard a mask?  Well, I grew it because I hated shaving.  Shaving left me sore and it took up far too much of my time.  But now?  Can I see myself without it?  Am I emotionally attached to it?  Well, it does, in a small way, represent me as an adult – not so much in the fact that I couldn’t grow one as a child, but more in the fact that I look like a fat nine year old without it.

The beard – even in its soon-to-be truncated form – is more than a mere coating to the skin.  It somehow defines me.  I am that short ginger bloke with the ever-whitening beard.  I don’t know whether I look my age with it, but without it I certainly do not.  My face bears the scars of bricks and bats, of rugby scrums and cricket balls, of high-speed skin to bark encounters, but somehow continues to look younger than it actually is.

My quandary was unexpected – even my unrivalled ineptitude with the beard trimmer never prepares me for the shock of facing a semi-strimmed face – should I trim back the rest of my beard to the 2mm stubble of my partial exfoliation, or shave it all off altogether and face the world as a younger, pudding-faced extrovert?  Well, in the event, the answer was rather more straightforward than the question because I do not possess a razor and there was no way I was going to take my partially shorn face out to buy one.  I would have to uni-trim first and by then, well, what would be the point of scraping the rest of it off?    It turns out that I am even more attached to my beard than I am to my face…