It is the Ancient Mariner!

It is the Ancient Mariner or is it?

 When I was naught but a lad I sailed the seven seas as an apprentice on a cargo boat. I suppose I was easily led because when the rest of the crew, to a man, including the Captain decided that the time had come to renounce shaving and we would all grow beards. I only shaved two or three times a week and then only to remove the bum-fluff.
No-one shaved for fifteen months, a few trimmed their magnificent beards in very stylish shapes and a few grew beards like the man on the Players cigarette packet. After fifteen months my blonde with ginger bits rather wispy offering was just about acceptable and nearly looked like a beard.

As is the way on small vessels, someone, I think it was the Chief Engineer decided to shave off his splendid beard as we chugged along the Red Sea towards the Suez Canal and we saw that his leathery tanned skin above his Plimsoll line was a deep golden brown but where his beard had been was now lily white and rapidly turning pink. A panic ensued and about ninety percent of the crew, including me, followed his example and were walking around the deck with our chins in the air muttering “God make me brown but dinna burn me”. We had less than a week of sunshine before reaching Blighty in mid-winter.

All that winter I had a two-tone face and the experience was more than enough to put all thoughts of beard growing out of mind for the rest of my days. Until that is, in my lazy retirement I decided that shaving every day was just too much trouble . . . .

Two weeks have gone by and the beard is a bit more than designer stubble length. Today I looked in the mirror and saw this haggard old greybeard looking back at me. Oh my God! Vain beggar that I am, I shaved off and thanked my lucky stars that my face still has an acceptable tan and I look twenty years younger.

It is an Ancient Mariner and he stoppeth one of three. “By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, now wherefore stopp’st thou me?” “Hold off! Unhand me, grey bearded loon”  JC

 

About Jake

Long retired travel writer, author and freelance journalist. Educated at Wolverton Grammar and Greenwich Naval College. Happily married since 1958, with a married son and daughter, a married granddaughter and an adult grandson. Hobbies rock-climbing, dinghy racing and ocean racing. Still regularly working out in the gym.
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