Society
If the Captain Haddock look is going to be the big thing of the year 2000, then I'll be in luck
Published 06 December 1999
Everyone should begin the year 2000 with a project. (Incidentally, one of the many irritations about it becoming 2000 is that you have to keep saying "the year 2000" because it doesn't sound like a year. You never had to say "the year 1995", did you? Think of all the extra time it's going to take up. The question is whether we'll get used to it or whether we'll have to keep saying "the year 2011" and so on for the rest of our lives.)
To resume, my project is to grow a beard. Obviously it ought to be something more constructive, such as writing a book, but the great disadvantage of writing books vis-a-vis growing beards is that your book doesn't grow while you're asleep or, indeed, while you're awake, most of the time.
In any case, beards are going to be the next big thing. Not those Jimmy Hill-style goatees that look as if they've got stuck by mistake on the end of your chin. I would always be uncomfortable with one of those beards that are really a form of delicate topiary. I remember years and years ago, when I used to watch the end of Grandstand (having watched the beginning and the middle), one of the presenters who delivered the football reports was a man called Denis Lowe. But I couldn't concentrate on anything he said because he had a neatly trimmed, droopy moustache that was definitely asymmetrical.
I already suffer from a rare paranoid condition that makes me think there is something on my face - a mark, a stain, a piece of food. Whenever I go to a public place, I touch my face in a strange, pitter-patter sort of motion which, needless to say, is as likely to put something on to my face as take it off.
So the idea of growing something on my face has generally seemed about as attractive as putting a small piece of grit into my eye and keeping it there. But growing a beard in the old-fashioned way - just letting everything grow - might be another matter.
Apparently, the most influential group in British rock music is the Beta Band. Readers probably know the most famous "amusing" rock music fact. I never heard any music by the group ZZ Top, but I knew that two of the group's three members had extremely long beards. But - and this is the interesting part - the one who didn't have a beard was actually called Beard.
All of the Beta Band have beards - at least now and then. And they dress like me as well: old jeans worn at the knees, any old T-shirt topped with some terrible jacket with a hood. It is, they say, part of a new rural, anti-technological aesthetic.
As it happens, the music is very good as well. Every so often, I urge some new enthusiasm on readers. My latest is the Beta Band's record called "The Three EPs". Remember those old psychedelic records in which groups such as Traffic and Caravan would retreat into the country and be mellow and self-indulgent? Imagine that, but done in the style of someone modern and clattery such as Beck, and done on all sorts of strange instruments that happen to be lying around the studio.
There's something rural about the sound (there are even bits of birdsong), but it's the ruralism of breeze-blocks and piles of unidentifiable rusting machinery in the corners of fields - if you see what I mean. You'll probably hate it.
I don't know whether it was an omen, but while pondering beards I read a review by the distinguished classicist Hugh Lloyd-Jones in the New York Review of Books. The review was of a biography of the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian was the first bearded Roman Emperor and there is scholarly argument about whether this was because he wanted to look like an (even more) ancient Roman or like a Greek philosopher.
From then on, emperors were "bearded, or at least ill shaven" until Constantine the Great. Tertullian (AD160-225) asserted that no beardless man could go to heaven, which is a further incentive. On the other hand, in previous failed attempts I always lost my nerve and shaved when it started to itch uncontrollably.
I dug out an old New Statesman photograph of me and sketched a beard on it. If Captain Haddock is going to be "the look" of the year 2000, then I'm in luck.
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