Rohan Candappa’s brief, for the May 2021 ThreadMash event, was as follows:

All being good, lockdown is scheduled to loosen its collar on Monday 17 May…

…I’m suggesting a theme that encourages us to reclaim some of the things that have been appropriated over the last year and a bit. Things like words. So I’d like you all to recover, repurpose and re-imagine the following words via the stories you write and share:

Hands, Face, Space

Strangely, the subject matter below was already forming in my mind as part of my “Forty Years On” series about my time at Keele.

The Six O’Clock Alarm Would Never Ring, Starting My First Keele Summer Term, 24 April to 9 May 1981

Rohan says, “never explain” and I have in part explained. Let’s allow my story to tell it’s own tale from here.

HANDS

I have two cack-hands.

Kind people, on observing that I play tennis off both arms, describe me as ambidextrous. But the word “dextrous” should not be used to describe me.

The truth is, I am ambi-cack-handed; neither dextrous with my right nor with my left hand. 

For most purposes where only one hand is involved, I use my right hand.  Writing and drawing for example. But I do those things cack-handedly.  Computers have saved me from a teacher-predicted lifetime of illegible handwriting misery.  

I have always brushed my teeth with my left hand. Some experts suggest this means that I am a natural leftie who mistakenly adopted right-handedness for most tasks. But concerted attempts to use my left hand as a child was a bigger disaster than my using the right hand…apart from the left-handed tooth-brushing.

Then along came the need to shave.

FACE

In the late 1970s, an American entrepreneur named Victor Kermit Kiam The Second announced that he was so impressed with the Remington electric shaver his wife bought him as a gift, he henceforward would eschew the use of the wet shavers he had used throughout his life and…

…get this…

…Victor Kiam bought the company that made Remington shavers.

My dad was way ahead of Victor Kiam in switching from blades to Remington electric shavers; by the late 1970s, dad had several of them. Two at the house, plus one at the shop, where dad’s routine required a five-o’clock shave, removing shadow ahead of late afternoon customers (or mostly lack thereof, by the late 1970s). Dad was not ahead of Victor Kiam in the matter of entrepreneurship. 

In my early days shaving, I used dad’s spare Remington at home to remove the odd visible patch of dark fluff from my face.

When I set off for Keele University in autumn 1980, dad lent me that spare Remington, plus lotion bottles (pre shave and after shave) plus an old spare illuminated art-deco-style shaving mirror. The makeshift electrical wiring and plugs for that paraphernalia looked like a physics experiment.

But whereas prior to Keele, my facial hair only became visible once every few days, I soon started to notice daily patches of hair and started to shave regularly.

Increased Remington use combined badly with regular intake of beer, cigarettes and the rest. My face and neck became sore losers of facial hair; itchiness and blotchiness abounded. 

For my second term at Keele, Dad switched my loan from the old Remington to a more modern foil-headed electric shaver…

…but the skin irritation persisted; possibly it even got worse.

Thus, over Easter 1981, contra-Kiam as it were, dad and I agreed that I would switch from electric to wet shaving. Dad rebundled my loan, replacing the Remington with the Rolls Razor he had used as a young soldier during the war.

This contraption, which they stopped making before I was born, was a metal box containing a strop and a re-useable safety razor. You would sharpen the blade on the strop, then detach the razor for your wet shave. Eventually you would change the blade, which, if memory serves me well, required a screwdriver and a fair bit of dexterity.

The other thing that needed dexterity was the safe use of such a safety razor.

We could not buy the company that had made Rolls Razor – it had gone bust by then – but we should have invested in the makers of styptic pencils and sticking plasters.

I recall seeing several horror films towards the end of my first year at Keele; The Amityville Horror and The Shining spring to mind, so I had plenty of suitable similes to describe the bloody bathroom scenes of my early Rolls-Razor efforts. I did eventually get the hang of it and wet-shaved for the next 25 years. Left-handed.

SPACE

But why did a long-haired ha’porth of a student, with two cack hands and a skin-sensitive face even bother with shaving?

The answer lies not in the facial hair itself, but in the space between the patches of facial hair.

It was OK for the youngsters who were blessed with a full growth of facial hair at the age of 18. Simon Jacobs, for example, had five-o’clock shadow from the start at Keele.  But most of us looked ridiculous with sparse facial hair.

I recall Richard Van Baaren naming our Lindsay F-Block corridor’s five-a-side football team ‘Tempted ‘Tache, in honour of fellow undergraduate males’s failed attempts at moustaches.  No, I didn’t play for that team; I have two left feet as well as two cack-hands.

Inadequate facial hair was like a flashing neon sign saying JUVENILE…BOY…NOT YET A MAN.  That tell-tale wispy, fluffy face space had to go, even if the result was bloody carnage, born of cack-hands.