The Beard Oil Does Not Make the Philosopher

My adoptive great-great-grandfather, being quintessentially Victorian, was both a God-bothering do-gooder who founded the NSPCC (one too many ‘C’s in there, I fear) and the wearer of a prodigious beard. Like Lear’s Old Man’s beard, it could easily have accommodated two owls and a hen, as well as four larks and a wren (and maybe a few mice). One hundred or so years of social progress has led all but a few of us to announce, with tedious regularity, that God is dead; the belligerent among us have taken a few more steps down this path and have relegated all religions to the ignoble status of Death Cults. Over-generous beards, however, are still with us.

With the vexatious notion of God no longer troubling our thoughts, we can now spend the appropriate amount of time on the truly serious business of existence: admiring how absolutely divine we all look. Thank God for that.

Only the other day, in an attempt to keep the spirit of spousal affability alive, I had the grave misfortune of watching possibly the most repulsive TV programme I have ever seen. The presenter of this show, a flame-haired obsessive compulsive shopper/lunatic, who desperately needed to avail herself of some of that old Buddhist wisdom regarding the acquisition of goods, explained in a flurry of psychotic euphoria just exactly which items of getting and spending had been in the ‘boom’ part of the ‘boom-and-bust’ economic cycle during the previous twelve months. Before I ran screaming from the room, the impossibly happy shopper was explaining, apparently mid-orgasm, that men’s grooming products now occupied twice as much shelf space as they had twelve months previously. Beard oil, I learned, was something which last year almost no-one had heard of. But now[1]?

With young men now wasting all of their spare time oiling beards[2], it will be left to the beardless atheists of this country to follow in the footsteps of great men like Benjamin Waugh. I plan to devote my spare non-God-bothering/freshly-shaven time to founding the NSPC.

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[1] Plus ca change, hopefully.

[2] The gullible, narcissistic buffoons.