OH is an avowed fan of steampunk, a crypto-Victorian sci-fi literary genre featuring monumental metal flying machines held together with rusty bolts and piloted into the future by top-hatted, twinkly-eyed inventors. With massive beards.
I have noticed how, over the years that I've known him, OH has subtly graduated from clean-shaven to a tidy little goatee to added side burns joining with the goatee. Then the beard started to expand over the cheeks and down his throat. Now he has evidently decided to grow the beard long as well and has stopped trimming it, giving him, after almost two weeks, a very fetching Wild Man of the Woods look. Or perhaps more like Mild Man of the Woods. In any case, he wears it well.
Yesterday, he brought home some hairwax. "For the 'tache," he said, and showed me some of the 19th-century portrait photographs he's collected in an album where serious men in bowler or top hats and three-piece suits sported ornately twirled moustaches.
"Hm." I took a close look at his.
"It's a bit of a soup-strainer right now," he conceded, "But I want to grow it long so that I can part and style it."
I showed him a picture of Jean Pütz on the internet, a well-known German science tv presenter with an enormous curly moustache, who is also slightly daft.
"Something like this?"
OH wasn't convinced. He wanted something waxed and twirled to a thin 45 degree downward-pointing number. I really hope he doesn't go for that one -- it makes him look hangdog, which is so not his character.
"How about a Pirates-of-the-Caribbean, Jack-Sparrow-style double goatee plait?" But he wouldn't go with the dreadlocks
It was obvious he saw himself as a cross between the balloon guy in Around the World in 80 Days, the mad inventor of Metropolis, the jovial Victorian patriarch-entrepreneur inspecting the fermentation vats of his own brewery, and the man in the Pringles logo.
We discussed a good friend of ours, tattooed all over, a militant vegetarian with a wonderful psycho vibe, the sort of person you want glowering protectively behind you during a confrontation with a street gang. His largely untamed beard is currently reaching Marxian proportions. Or Amish. Not yet ZZ Top. "Is that where you're headed?" -- "Don't know yet."
We needed more inspiration so we went back to the internet and tried downloading the media coverage of the German and European Beard Championships that took place in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and Bad Schussenried. It was, as you might have expected, dominated by Bavarians, Austrians and the Swiss whose beards were spectacular -- two-tone, twisted to a sharp point, or with ivy, pinecones and fake bluetits woven into them.
"I'll buy you a lovely posh top hat to go with your new Victorian beard," I said eventually, "just don't ever look like one of those dead babies that they also liked to keep pictures of."
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