Shaving Cuts

Shaving Cuts ©

By Michael Casey

I was wondering what to talk to you about today, I just let the breeze take me this way or that, in films somebody just flips a lucky coin, I just look out the window or around the room where I’m sat. I then had to have a shave, so while I was shaving I thought why not talk about shaving, we all do it after all. Farting and shaving is all men are good for, just ask their wives and daughters.

So when did you first start shaving? I was 14 or 15, I am part orangutan after all, well in fact I’m the 4^th son of a Kerry blacksmith. Naturally I cut myself to bits, I had a cut on my right cheek, so I turned the other cheek and had one on that too. My dad even shaved me once such was his desire for me not to bleed all over the kitchen floor. So I persevered until, I grew a beard, I had enough of the blood-letting so I grew the beard. I was going to grammar school with a beard and a satchel, ok I’m lying I had a ruck sack, in fact it’s still upstairs in a cupboard, perhaps my Latin homework is inside it. 40 years too late with your Latin homework, Casey, you are in detention Mr Proctor might say.

Shaving is a pain in the neck and no wonder vicars have collars, to hide their shaving rash, nothing to do with High Church, trust me it’s true, the local vicar told me so, they confess everything to me. When you shave though then and only then are you really clean. Just look at the water in the sink if you don’t believe me. Ask a woman too, you will not believe what you find in a man’s beard, perhaps even a thrush nesting, or a pair of squirrels hiding their nuts for the winter.

As you look in the sink you may be disgusted, but as you look up from the sink to see your face in the mirror a smile spreads across your face. I am gorgeous, I am irresistible, the girls will all swoon, I really am George Clooney. Well if you are a writer with imagination you might, until your kids tell you that you look less like grandad now, and more like that fat old man who sits on his garden wall all day farting and drinking cans of lager, and cursing at children as they go by. Reality and Imagination are two sides of different coins.  

In the old days all you had was a safety razor, a really dangerous piece of kit with wafer thin blades which are perfect for suicide, but as a safety razor the manufacturer was having a joke as far as the name was concerned. In those days there were not thousands of different razors either. Women’s razors had not even been thought of nor invented, until a bright spark thought of a way of fleecing woman for a similar product, at double the cost of a man’s razor, if they can do it with clothes, why not razors.

Carbolic soap, the red one, nurses used to smell of carbolic soap all those years ago. So when you shave you used carbolic soap which never produced a foam if memory serves. It cleanses but did not produce a foam, so in my case a trail of cuts all over my young teenage face. Shaving foam arrived on the scene and only girls used that, you’d say all macho like, or perhaps gay men and John Travolta use having foam, real men stuck to their carbolics, and could be spotted across the dance floor, bits of paper stuck to their face to cover the shaving nicks. When these real men joined the dancing to Saturday Night Fever a shower of paper like confetti went into the air and settled on their shoulders like dandruff, all because they were too macho to use shaving foam like their gay brothers.

In fact shaving gel is the best invention ever, after the donner kebab, because it does the job and you feel clean, and deluded into thinking you are George Clooney for a nanosecond. You can even use it to shave your ears, don’t think you’ll never need to, you will. And when that time comes think of me, gel is best, gel is best, as is wearing a vest. Your girlfriend will go wild, women wear lingerie for us, so the least you can do is wear a vest, containing your hairy chest. And if your girl does not like hair on her man, then you can always let her shave you, but make sure she uses shaving gel, Valentine’s Day is coming……