Whiskered

 We're approaching the 10th anniversary of a number of things, many of which make me smile, if a little sadly at times. Soon to come up is a decade since I ventured out to try and find Incognito Theatre
amongst the suburban labyrinth of New Southgate. I turned up, walked past it about 7 times (it is awfully well named), before finally spotting it around the back of a dark and silent doctors' surgery. The theatre had a church hall feel, and was populated only by elderly people painting the set, but one of them immediately offered me a part in The Comedy of Errors, and I'd found a theatrical home that would look after me for six years.

 The second, coming up in December, is a decade since my first ever trip to Australia. It was supposed to be a "trip of a lifetime" deal, a seven week loop of the eastern half of the continent. Then it turned out to be the equivalent of those moments where you wish a polite goodbye to someone you don't really like that much, and then find you're both walking off in the same direction and have to do it again several times. By the time I said a proper goodbye to Australia years later I knew her quite well, and miss her still.

I mock you, Amish guy....

The third 10th anniversary is very much linked to the second. That trip trip to Oz was the first time I ever grew a beard. It wasn't really a very good beard, as you can see. It was a product of some sort of sinful coming together of not being arsed to shave and thinking it gave me a rugged traveller look, which I suppose it did in a sort of old beyond my time McKewans-lager-swigging-itinerant sort of way. I was camping half the time so I probably looked like I'd been sleeping in a tramp's pants anyway. I lost my voice about two thirds through the holiday, and in my silence some young English tourists did confess that they thought I was cool and mysterious in a Clint Eastwood sort of way, since I spoke seldom and only in a gravelly whisper. It didn't last long. I got my voice back and immediately started singing Mairzy Doats. The whiskered visage could not save me from falling abysmally in their estimation.

 I may have said goodbye to Incognito and Australia, but I haven't said goodbye to the beard. It leaves me every now and again. Where it goes, I'm not quite sure. I got a postcard from Madagascar (a picture of a hang-gliding lemur) once in handwriting so bad it could only have been scrawled by a disembodied blob of facial hair, and there was the embarrassing time when it was caught trespassing in the back garden of Brian Wilde from Last of the Summer Wine, but apart from that, all I know is that it comes back to me eventually. And I'm very glad about that. Because I feel terribly exposed without it. Beardless pictures of myself make me cringe and want to quickly scrawl a fake one over my chin with a flip-chart marker. Even as the whiskers grow white in places and invite the intervention of Just for Men, (or at a push some more marker pen, though probably not a green one) I have developed the deep and abiding conviction without facial hair I look like Steve Coogan or, worse, like me. And that would be fairly disappointing for everybody.