I hadn't shaved in over a month. Nothing new, but this time when I finally decided to groom, something compelled me to leave behind a long, drooping fu manchu moustachio which gives me the look of a seasoned member of a certain San Berdoo outlaw motorcycle club. I've only appeared in public once before with so bold an accessory, and that was for a party at which a moustache was required for admittance. But how long can it last? It attracts an awful lot of attention. It's been a day spent on the receiving end of countless double takes, often from the face starring back in the mirror. Funny how beards, because they evolve so slowly, often pass unnoticed, but a moustache appears as a shock from out of the blue like an early 20th-century bomb-throwing anarchist.