bored of excitement – the griefjunkie blog 

Dear Rachel,

I was on the tube last Thursday, clattering along under the Pentonville Road and heading into the City, when I became the centre of attention for a very small and highly animated child. ‘It’s OK’, said her mother, struggling to contain the squirming infant, ‘She thinks you’re a bear’.

Amazingly, this is the second time in three months that I have been mistaken for a bear by delighted children, and is the reason that I have decided to shave my beard off. With the benefit of hindsight, this wasn’t an inspired move immediately prior to standing around outside as gales and blizzards howl around Camden Lock, but it was either that or reach the inevitable point where toddlers would be offering me jars of honey and drawings of Eeyore as I battle through Moorgate with the weekend’s stock

[Clicking Read More now will reveal inept beard related comedy jibes by East Yard observational wizard, Pikey Dave]

The removal of my beard always triggers a mirth drought for Pikey Dave. This is because he has built a Perrier Award winning comedy routine around the fact that, being an adult Caucasian male of Anglo-Norman descent with dark brown follicle colouring, I will have visible facial hair. That sort of thing is decided in your genes, like your height or star sign. Dave, however will come bounding up like an excited but horrible Labrador and say ‘No way , you have slight little hairs between your normal eyebrows, no way, that is mental’, like he is creating pioneering observational comedy.

You wouldn’t go up to a black fella and say ‘Yeah no way, I bet you probably have brown eyes’, because yes, he probably will. Or, I dunno, go up to a wheelchair fan and say ‘No way, I bet you have a nightmare climbing stairs or breakdancing or playing Twister’, because you see, yes, yes they will. It isn’t something that needs to be pointed out. Come to think of it, Dave has actually invented a new genre: punchlineless comedy. Idiot.