How do you know you are getting old? Some might say it's when you can't get into bed without a hot water bottle, and can't get out without a walking stick. Perhaps it's when the first grey hairs appear or even earlier when you can no longer call them laugh lines because they're actually proper wrinkles.
Another sure-fire indicator is that you hear yourself moaning out loud about the hairstyles of young people, which I happened to do earlier this week.
It goes without saying that the "Bieber" is universally hated by anyone old enough to vote, with the exception perhaps of shampoo executives who have had an unexpected windfall now that teenage boys have become as vain as their female contemporaries about maintaining their long locks.
But what of the designer stubble? A more recent arrival into the fashion field, it was until recently the preserve of the lazy, the drunk and the homeless. Now, regrettably, it has found a more populous home on the chins of otherwise upstanding young men. Men whose mothers taught them to clean their teeth before bedtime, and whose fathers leaned in front of the mirror with them at the onset of puberty and showed them how to go with the grain.
Shaving is an ancient ritual that has been passed from father to son in the same way hunting for mammoth once was. Aside from some dark moments in hirsute history (think President Abraham Lincoln and maybe John Lennon in the later years), a man's self-pride and personal grooming has hinged around a shave after breakfast.
