Let us start at the beginning, my first beard. It was while I was on summer holiday with my father and younger brother (3 years). We were staying in a backpacker hostel in Newquay Cornwall around 1992. My brother just quite casually said one day, "I think you should grow a beard". Alright I thought why not, so I grew a goatee. This was soon paired with some rather long pointy side burns which too this day I take full credit of inventing. (ok so may be not inventing, but at least in my small world at the time I had never come across anyone with burns like mine!) . Here you go this is a picture of me with my friend Fiona and my first beard. (and yes my hair is blue, told you I liked to be different)

 

This beard lasted for for some time, I'm talking a good three years or more, I died it blue. It faded to a not so attractive urine yellow (don't). Then the shape changed, I narrowed it down, took the side burns away. These actually brought it against themselves, I became so frustrated with them not being even, one pointed more down than the other etc. Then came the chin strip, this grew for a while as  you can see.


But these where early days, i wasn't until i grew my first full beard that it all changed, well i changed. My yogi girl friend wanted to do a detox, now I don't know if any of you have ever tried a detox? there are various different types out there but we went for what seemed to be the most extreme. We chose to cut out pretty much everything. I'm talking about firstly you know all the bad things, stimulants, caffeine, alcohol, then meat, sugar, dairy. We also removed from our diet, wheat, gluten food additives & preservatives. You may ask what did we eat? Well plenty really, pasta made from rice flour, or vegetable flour, fruit, veg, nuts, seeds, pulses. Now I don't want to go on about the pros & con's of detoxing but let me say those three weeks felt a long time, there was constipation along the way (sorry but i had to include that, it's a kind of warning) and the only high light was when we found out that goats cheese didn't count as diary. So it may come as no surprise that at this time i thought, well if I'm going to give up all this i may as well give up shaving as well! Think i was kind of throwing all my toys out of the pram. So i grew my first full beard.
                                            I have to say it felt good, something changed in me, i felt more manly than id ever felt before. It was a bit strange, i urge you if you have never tried a full beard give it a go, you may just find it liberating. It not only made me feel differently about myself, but things started  to happen, my life changed. Because of the beard i got randomly chosen to be an extra in a film! I wont go into the details but if you pause the film in just the right place you can see a shadowy figure in a church in "The Da Vinci Code".

I digress, forgive me. Enough back ground this can filter in along the hairy trail. The next post will be back on track with some serious tash grooming. G