The Idler

EIGHT OUT OF TEN CATS SHOULD WEAR WHISKERS

JOHNNY ACTON calls for the return of the moustache

“Daddy, there’s a man at the door with a moustache” “Tell him I’ve already got one.” (Traditional)

There was a time when the above joke would have elicited nods of recognition from the vast majority of both fathers and travelling salesmen. “Everyone has a moustache”, the thinking would have gone, “so it was inevitable that such a confusion would happen sooner or later.” But today, our first instinct is to assume that something fishy is afoot. Perhaps the man at the door is the father’s secret lover or his colleague in some sinister right-wing sect. The salesman gambit must be a device to deflect the son’s attention. You don’t just get two moustaches coming together in the wild like that.

Yet the moustache has been right under the nose of much of mankind for almost the entirety of recorded history. Even its notable absences, as in the middle of the beard-rimmed faces of the Amish, have been pregnant with meaning for those who know how to look. When Lech Walesa impetuously shaved off his, Poland experienced a brief collapse of economic confidence. At various times it has served as a defiant badge of allegiances political, religious and sexual. It has even been at the centre of the odd war. What has become of this once proud appendage? And do we not have a duty to resuscitate it?

Personally, I have always been fascinated and repelled by the moustache in roughly equal measure. It has always struck me as deeply unobvious, like the pink hair sported by certain old ladies, or shaving off one of your eyebrows. Yet few scientists of human nature seem to have considered the matter even worthy of comment. This conspiracy of silence eventually became too much for me. I had to find out what moustaches were for, even if it killed me. To do this, I settled on a two-pronged attack: go to the library, and bloody well grow one.

There is no doubt that the twentieth century was an unmitigated public relations disaster for the ‘tash. First there was Stalin, whose whiskers were so foreboding that they were used, minus the rest of his face, in a successful post-war poster campaign to dissuade Italians from voting Communist. Then there was Hitler, who certainly didn’t do much for the lip-rug. And when moustache’s did eventually start to make a comeback in the late Sixties and early Seventies, they were immediately adopted en masse by the Gay movement, throwing things into hopeless confusion. Even the enlightened tend not to want to come across as gay unless they are, and the Reynoldses and Redfords of this world, who had inspired all this hair growth in the first place, went rushing back to their razors. Eventually the inevitable happened, and even the Clones grew tired of their handlebars. So now there was no-one to hold the fort. Except Desmond Lynham.

But if the millennium was good for one thing, it was for freeing us up from our narrow focus on the late twentieth century and encouraging us to take the long view. And viewed in the great context of history, few things come out quite as well as the moustache.

From the moment of its first appearance on the historical scene, the moustache was all about manliness and independence. It made its debut on the faces of the untameable Barbarian hordes who lurked beyond the perimeters of the Roman Empire. The notion that they wore beards, hence the name, is erroneous (”Barbarian” actually derives from the supposed sound of their language). What the Goths, Gauls Celts et al really liked were moustaches.

The fearsome impression made by these unrestrained fruits of the upper lip on the invariably clean shaven or fully bearded Greeks and Romans is difficult to overestimate. Julius Caesar, betraying his culture’s aversion to the ‘tache in his evident lack of a word for the thing, described the Ancient Britons as shaving “every part of the body, except the head and the upper lip”. Meanwhile, the writer Strabo described the inhabitants of Cornwall as having mustachios which “hang down upon their breasts like wings”.

This tradition of the moustache as a symbol of spirited non-conformity pops up again and again. The semi-animistic Kurdish Yarsans, for instance, grow spectacular ‘tashes in open defiance of their Muslim neighbours, despite being periodically persecuted for their trouble. Indeed, Islam and organised religion in general has never felt comfortable with a hairstyle that smacks so much of the fertility cult. Mohammed himself in one hadith (saying) explicitly commands his followers to “trim closely the moustache and grow the beard, and thus act against the fire-worshippers (Zoroastrians)”. Few religious tenets have been so openly flouted.

The moustache continued to retain revolutionary credentials well into the nineteenth century. In 1830, the citizens of Brussels took to the streets in their droves, wearing false ‘tashes to cock a snook at their Dutch overlords who had banned them (when troops were sent in to conduct a door-to-door search for the protestors, they found that all that facial hair had miraculously vanished). But the king of the moustachioed Victorians was undoubtedly Frederick Nietzsche, who sported a specimen which beggared belief. In surviving photographs, it looks as though a small black cloud has drifted in front of his face. But the real significance of this ?�bertache lies in its relationship with its master’s
philosophy - uncompromising, provocative and utterly idealising of manly virtues.

Morally, then, and philosophically, there is very nearly a duty to grow a moustache. But what can be said for it from an experiential point of view? Well I can’t deny that there were some tricky moments during my own experiment, particularly in the early days when it did occur to me that I might look a little like a 17 year old Portuguese fado singer. But overall, I am able to report that planet ‘tash is a happy and fulfilling place.

It quickly became apparent that my new friend was going to increase my chances of being both being served in bars and chatted up by slightly bedraggled middle-aged women. The most striking feature, though, particularly in the early days, was an intoxicating sense of my own potency. After all, I had managed to produce a completely new part of myself effortlessly and in a matter of days. I felt fearless, transformed, and teeming with testosterone.

I can honestly recommend that everyone who can grow a moustache does so, at least once in their lives. The boost to self-confidence by taking the risk is justification enough. You will emerge with your moral muscle greatly enhanced. Beyond that, there is the opportunity to feel part of a club with an heroic and marvellously colourful past, and the for-the-hell-of-it joy of doing something just because one can.

Besides, growing a moustache has decent idler credentials. You don’t actually have to do anything - it happens all by itself (actually this is a lie: paradoxically, I found myself doing much more shaving than before, for fear of losing the outline of the damned thing. But I’m sure you are with me in principle).

If history has taught us anything, it is that one day the timid goatee, which seems to have a monopoly on facial hair at present, will unclench its wings and the moustache will once again fly proudly throughout the land. The only question is where and on whom it will then choose to alight. . . There is a ‘tash out there for everyone. You must go and find yours.