Face Furniture

This is very bad! Six months after we first went into Covid-19-induced lockdown, the jewel of the north finds itself in lockdown again, as of midnight just passed. Not what we had in mind after all the steps we've taken and impositions we've accepted to help the country get this pandemic under control. SNAFU is the apt acronym, I think, this tantalisingly sunny late September morning. I could go off on one, but I had a blog mapped out in mind, so I'll brew up a second damned fine cup of coffee and stick to the A plan.

There have been some great blogs this week on the allotted theme of sideboards, anecdotal, informative posts about heavy pieces of dining-room furniture. I thought of following suite - that would have been the G Plan - but then decided to take the etymological road less-travelled. So guess what, kids? This post is going to concern itself primarily with men's facial hair.

American English may be making a 21st century bid for ubiquity, but I remember when sideburns were called sideboards by any self-respecting British hirsute with a decent set of face furniture. 

As uppity youths of post-war Britain intent on forging an identity of our own and kicking against square norms, when our parents, schools, workplaces banned us from growing long hair or beards, sideboards (aka sidies) became our rebellious frontier, our badge of allegiance to youth revolution. The longer and thicker we could get away with, the more kudos to the wearer. Our idols, Presley, the Beatles, any half-way famous Tom, Dick or Harriet (more on that later), aped and egged us on.

Some claim that sideboards is a corruption of sidebeards, but I think that's over-fanciful and rather nonsensical; others champion sideborders, which may have a greater claim to legitimacy. But I think they were always just sideboards, whether as a direct allusion to the pieces of furniture they resembled or because both they and the furniture were board-shaped and on the side(s) - simplest explanation fits.

I grew my own sideboards just a far down my face as I could get away with at school in the 1960s. Then as soon as I escpaped the institution I let them meet in the middle and I've worn a beard ever since, except for a brief (three month) period in the late 1970s when I shaved it off to appear as Mack the Knife in the Threepenny Opera.

Sideboards, whether neat, sculpted, bushy or plain outrageous, are still popular to this day as a means of establishing a sense of facial identity, and that goes for women as well as men in this age of follicle equality.

As for the American term sideburns, supposedly derived from a Civil War General Ambrose Burnside famed for his sideboards, that's just an example of 'not invented here' syndrome. Sideboards came first and deserve to live longest in common usage. Could it be a campaigning issue under the 'make Britain great again umbrella'? Come on Boris, grow a pair! (You know I'm joking, right?)

And so to the new poem this week, which has almost exactly nothing to do with any of the foregoing, except in tenuous concept. It's a bit of a mystery-tale based on purported accounts of a temporal fault-line in Liverpool into which people occasionally disappear, like items into a sideboard, never to be seen again. If you want to know more, google Bold Street Time Slip. It's another narrative poem of sorts. I don't seem to be able to break free of them at the moment. Anyway, I hope you'll dig it.

Bold Street Time Slip

No one particulary noticed

just another lively gaggle

of teenage royalty, children

of the nanny state stepping out

high on sunshine and wine,

joking denim-clad lads in tow

with mini-skirted wenches

boldly claiming Bold Street

for their own, Saturday noon,

until suddenly they weren't.

It was a queer thing. Few

saw them slip from view

right outside the tobacconist's,

leaving a hint of patchouli

and sex in the air, no more.

Like they walked though

a wall that wasn't there,

said one old biddy. You

couldn't trust her eyes.

I heard a scream said a kid

out shopping with his mum

and dad who never did.

And that was that. Except

for the fact they were gone.

An unsolved mystery still,

they weren't the first to go

and likely will not be the last.

Tomorrow never knows!

Thanks for reading. Mind how you go, too. S ;-)