I have recently started to wax my moustache.
Why this feels like some kind of confession, I don’t know.
It isn’t the first time that I have waxed my moustache, although to be honest I had thought that I was no longer subject to the vanities of youth.
I am 53 years of age, and severely disabled thanks to multiple sclerosis. So this is hardly something that is designed to improve my Saturday nights on the town.
The first time that I waxed my moustache was when I was much younger, and years before MS was over on the scene.
I was 22 years of age, living as a recently graduated student in London, and active in the management of the housing in which I had been living since my last year at university.
This was a housing co-operative in East London, and my only photographic evidence of my appearance at the time is my old underground monthly tube pass, which has a small passport sized photograph showing me with my waxed moustache.
Although I display this small image proudly tucked into the frame of a picture on one of my walls, most people that see it think of it as something rather quirky, and my ex-wife and good friend (still) has been quite frank with me, and says that I look as if I were some kind of terrorist.
I can’t say that I agree, but perhaps there is something less than typical about this photograph.
This would have been taken in about 1982, and at the time, I obtained my supplies of moustache wax from a small costume supplier somewhere off Drury Lane in the West End of London.
It was the kind of small shop that I imagine would have gone out of business many years ago, and so when it came to obtaining supplies of moustache wax once again only recently, I had no idea where I would obtain supplies.
Of course, what I had failed to take into account was the fact that we live in the Internet age, and a swift search of the Internet led me to a page of moustache wax suppliers on Amazon which quite took me aback.
The choice was astonishing, I had no idea that I would be presented with the problem of choice rather than the difficulty of finding the stuff.
Clearly, there has been a resurgence of interest in moustache waxing.
And of course, since I have started to wax my moustache, I have started to see waxed moustaches in many contexts where otherwise I might have entirely missed them.
So for example garden designers at the recent Chelsea flower show, and this has made me reflect simply that when you get a red car, you see red cars everywhere.
Another inspiration for me has been the recent BBC dramatised documentary of the 37 days leading up to the start of the First World War.
Set in that summer of 1914, it is a veritable parade of extraordinary moustaches, from all across Europe.
It has made me start to ruminate about the way in which this was of course the glory day of the waxed moustache, and I realise that I have been a secret collector of old photographs of men with grand moustaches, picking them up in junk shops and at the markets. Almost rescuing them or adopting them when they have become forgotten and unloved.
But there is perhaps something sombre and sad in the realisation that it was the First World War that put an end to this aspect of male vanity in its ultimate flowering.
Because all of those grand moustaches from the Edwardian period were destroyed in that terrible conflict, and in some respects, it is a terrible cliche that the young officer leading his troops from the trenches and into battle would have sported some kind of handlebar moustache.
But there it is, I have started to cultivate a waxed moustache, and in my case, given the limitations placed upon me by my multiple sclerosis, I am fortunate that my carers have risen to the challenge of waxing my moustache for me.
It has become part of my daily routine, being assisted with shaving using an electric razor, rather than having a three-day stubble which has been my typical appearance since forever.
And then, a slap and a wax. The application of aftershave, the slap, and then the waxing of the moustache.
It’s my only vanity, I console myself.
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