At the age of 42, I still can’t grow a beard

There are plenty of good reasons to be nostalgic about the Nineties – at least if you grew up in them: the Premier League started, Britpop burgeoned, Blair won his landslide, we got a fifth TV channel, the economy (eventually) boomed. All in all, people were confident and beautiful; the world was more or less peaceful; we hadn’t yet reached the point of probable no return on climate change. Oh, and the internet hadn’t ruined everything.

Yes, yes, there were a few downsides – and Channel 5 was pretty crap – but let’s leave that for another time. One of the other very good things about the Nineties was that there were almost no beards. Massive sideburns had their moment in the sun, and towards the back end of the decade some very precise goatees gained dubious prominence. But honestly, if I sit and think for five minutes about the most famous beards of the period, I struggle to get much beyond Noel Edmonds and Robin Cook.

At my sixth form college, facial hair was permitted but very rarely seen, aside from on a couple of scruffy grunge fans. When I went to university in 1997, there was a similar beard desert. Having checked a year group photograph for the purposes of this column, there appear to have been three beards only – one sported by a scientist, one by a narcissist and the last by a German.

This was good, not only for the general aesthetics of the world, but because I was – and remain – keenly aware of my complete inability to grow a beard myself. I don’t think I started shaving at all until I was about 16, and as a student I only bothered with it every few days: nobody would notice the difference much anyway.

The facial hair landscape of today is utterly transformed. Last week, I met a group of journalism students: a delightful, engaged bunch, among whom (for the lads at least) beards were evidently de rigueur. Some were precisely-shaped, others were more natural; a couple might more reasonably have been described as controlled stubble, while one or two were very much on the wispy side. The pressure for young men of the 2020s to generate some form of face fur is plainly intense.

But it’s not only youngsters who are at it. Even sensible, non-hipsterish men of my age seem to have felt the allure of the jaw fuzz in the last few years. Most of my close friends from those beard-desert uni days have developed hirsute chins: one or two actually look moderately distinguished, though others have rightly thought better of it.

I am not wholly immune to the burden of social expectation when it comes to appearance, despite what my predilection for corduroy trousers might suggest. With beards sprouting all around me, I decided not long ago – using the opportunity of a holiday from work – to ditch my razor and let nature take its course.

For the first three or four days, I simply looked grubby. From a distance, you might have thought I had laid a fire and then absent-mindedly wiped a sooty hand around my cheeks. On day five, short stubble finally became recognisable as such; a strange mix of dark, auburn and grey hairs, all too sparsely-spread to be convincing. After a week or so, I had the confidence to take a blade to the edges, to try to give my fledging thicket some definition. But the patchiness of the thing was stubborn: I looked a little like a cornfield after a rainstorm.

Eventually, with a return to the office close at hand, I decided to admit defeat. I didn’t want people to think I was having some sort of crisis. I shaved in stages, just to make sure I wouldn’t look better with a goatee or a moustache. Needless to say, neither option was favourable: with the former I looked like a teenager trying to use evidence of facial hair to prove he was old enough to be served in a pub; with the latter I looked like the kind of person you wouldn’t leave your children with.

As I stood in front of those journalism students last week, I felt glad to be clean-shaven. I will resist the pressure to try again to fit in with the beardy crowd. And should you ever see me with a few days’ growth just visible, please hand me a razor and tell me to remember the Nineties.