The baby is crying in the middle of Stoke Newington High Street. ‘Oh don’t worry,’ I say to my friend Charlie, as my son recoils from him on sight. I’d run into Charlie while on the way to buy some wine and, seconds after peering into the pram, he was met with a torrent of fretful sobbing. Soon he’s screaming. Not Charlie, who’s taking it very well, but my son, whose face has now lapsed into full-on crying emoji. ‘It’s your beard,’ I say with relaxed compassion. ‘He hates beards.’
I’d once have considered this quite an insensitive thing to say, but since having a child I’ve found it’s the only recourse in such situations. As with dogs, a bad reaction from a child is one of the few times it’s polite to directly ascribe a negative reaction to someone’s physical appearance. ‘Sorry about the pup,’ you might say, as your poodle foams angrily at a friend. ‘He’s weird with gingers and Italians.’ For whatever reason, people prefer to be given a physical cause. It’s as if without it, there exists an unspoken assumption that the child’s reaction simply means you’re a bad person who does not deserve to be loved.
Beards aren’t something my son has encountered at home – I’ve never been able to grow facial hair. If I don’t shave for a day or two, I get a moustache so inconsistently distributed it looks like a little fuzzy barcode. Maybe this is what my son hates: all the masculine traits denied him by my genetics.
He has short red hairs all over his head, but they haven’t yet exploded into an actual do just yet, certainly not compared to other little friends, like Bill, who came out of the womb with Lego-man hair.
He should, however, take solace in the fact my genes might make him look younger, as when I get ID’d in Morrisons when purchasing the aforementioned wine. I love it when this happens, particularly showing them my ID and laughing about the misunderstanding, and how it was caused by how young and attractive I look.
My wife doesn’t find it as funny as the people in Morrisons, no matter how many times I come home, excited, to tell her. More than once she’s even implied that, by now, they’ve probably worked out how happy it makes customers and just ID them to achieve that effect. ‘Well,’ I counter, ‘if that’s true then why don’t they ever ID you, eh?’
I add it’s probably this kind of cynicism that’s aged her prematurely, leaving my skin moist and taut as summer fruit, while she casts the haggard form of a dusty old crone, incapable of being mistaken for a teenager by even the most short-sighted supermarket staff.
She’s unimpressed by this and starts asking, again, if we really need all this wine I keep buying. I throw my hands up. Some people are just so sensitive about their appearance.
Follow Séamas on Twitter @shockproofbeats
