I started shaving in high school, because there was a rule saying I had to. As near as I could tell, the rule had first been established by Alexander the Great, but since he wasn’t my field commander I was unclear on why I was expected to comply with his manual of military conduct. I didn’t see any functional reason for engaging in the sisyphean endavour of removing hair from my face every day, and I knew I was going to stop as soon as high school was finished, but I complied with the rule because I didn’t care enough one way or the other to make a fuss about it. I had a second-hand 1960s electric shaver that my grandfather had originally bought in the 1960s, and I made a token effort to pretend I had no beard. In the last week of the seventh form the shaver finally died, and I didn’t bother to replace it.

After a few months my beard was long enough that I felt I ought to trim it for general tidiness, much as people get their hair cut even though they don’t shave it all off every time. I found that scissors weren’t the perfect tool, so I began to use a hair trimmer for the shorter bits of beard on my cheeks. This seemed perfectly fine for several years, until I became a teacher myself, when I felt obliged to buy a proper electric shaver to trim my cheek hair more closely than can be achieved with a hair trimmer. And I carried on with that until yesterday, when it occurred to me that even my electric shaver was still pretty hopeless, and maybe I should try one of those manual shavers that people use when they think of what they’re doing as actual shaving instead of my own mental model of the behaviour as trimming my beard really really closely.

So I bought one, and it turns out they’re really good. Who knew?