A shorter history of facial hair

Hi there. I'm Dr Yobbo. You may remember me from such blogs as Dr Yobbo's World of Bollocks or that dodgy one about ficticious rock bands or that food one of Beeso's which I can't think of anything to write for now that Dr Mrs Dr Yobbo is doing the cooking. Although for the purposes of this discussion (or at least for the Movember team registration) I'm not Dr Yobbo, I'm a James Smith, whatever that is. Why James Smith? Well John Smith would have been too obvious, Ian Smith was a gobby NZ wicketkeeper, Smith & Smith are the Kiwi version of Windscreens O'Brien and Engelbert Humperdinck would have made no bloody sense whatsoever. So James Smith it is. Apparently.

Now that we've got introductions out of the way... facial hair, the uses and etiquette thereof. And whether it's ever appropriate for gingas to grow any. It's a pertinent point as we have a decent ranga contingent amongst our playing roster this Movember, yours included - though as a ranga of Etruscan descent at least I'm a class apart from you Celtic convict bloodnuts - and while some engagingly deluded womenfolk seem to find this attractive, it's a simple fact that ginger facial hair suits nobody, apart from Dutch porn stars and geography teachers.

I first grew a beard about ten years ago. It was a goatee, because it was the '90s, and it was what you did back in those heady post-grunge days. I didn't grow it to look like a geography teacher. I grew it because I was 21 and sick of being carded for ID everywhere I went... pubs, clubs, bottle shops, cinemas, video rental stores, driver licencing offices, you name it. Even got carded by my parents at home once. Fact. Apparently I wasn't getting in with these shoes, but I knew they just reckoned I had dodgy ID.

Anyway, it worked. I stopped getting carded and I also started getting orders of magnitude more action with The Ladies, though with the proviso that ten times bugger all is still not much. Later, during a particularly productive period of unemployment, the goatee became a full beard. It went everywhere with me. I got married in it. Even took it on holiday. Here it is enjoying a beer at the World Superbikes at Brands Hatch in the UK last year with me and my mate Chris who appears to be about to be struck by lightning, but as it turns out, wasn't. Probably because he was protected by the AWSMness of my shifty ginger beard. I have no scientific basis to support this claim, which makes it at least as efficacious a cure as homeopathy.

However, after that things grew a little sour. We grew apart. Well, to be honest, there was violence involved. I admit it. I attacked my beard with a set of clippers. It was unprovoked and it was brutal. I don't know what it was. I guess I was just sick of looking like a geography teacher. Since then, apart from a carefully maintained frisson of stubble, facial hair and Your Correspondent have gone our separate ways.

Until now.

Well, it's for charity, I guess. And as Alexei Sayle once pointed out, you can do whatever the hell you like for charity. If Hitler had invaded Poland for spina bifida it would have been all right.

Godwinned already? Time I got out of here. Photos of our hideous nude faces (a.k.a. the 'Before' shots) to follow shortly. This is all for a good cause, so if you find any of the mo's on show impressive, amusing, faintly terrifying or just plain laughable, dig deep and lob some coin at our team page on Movember.com.

Anyway, I didn't want to look like a geography teacher. I wanted to look like... a LUMBERJACK!

But that's another, duller, story.

The Doctor is OUT.