When I was a kid my dad had so much of a beard it was essentially the only defining feature of his entire head. Dad was defined – much like Groucho Marx, or Hitler – by the accessories of his face rather than the bone structure underneath it: perfectly round bald circle head, Homer Simpson-esque Ms of hair on either side, a beard to join them, and glasses in between. I truly do not know if my father had a nose or not. Were there eyes behind the glasses? It is impossible to tell. Freckles, moles, scars, wrinkles? Honestly couldn’t tell you. I would say once a year for the past decade-and-a-half I have been walking through a train station and seen a bald man with glasses and just gone, ‘Ah, that is my dad then.’ You see those heartbreaking viral videos, don’t you, of orphan monkeys being given to a surrogate mother, and you think: ‘How can the idiot monkey be so easily convinced that this baboon with tits is its true mother? Come on, baby monkey. Interrogate the information a little.’ But honestly give me pints enough to reduce my faculties and introduce me to a bald man with glasses and I’ll just assume he is my father, no questions asked. I’ll curl up at his feet and ask him to tell me a story. I’ll beg him not to leave me again. The scene, after a while, will actually become quite chilling.

My dad’s beard was so intrinsic to him that the day he shaved it off it felt like a glitch in the matrix. I came home from school and he was just looking at me, smiling, and I looked at his face – a jawline I had never seen before in my life, a chin, oddly soft skin around the jowls – and my mind couldn’t really process what it was seeing. ‘Notice anything?’ he said, and I said: ‘There’s definitely something.’ We stared at each other for a minute or so. ‘There’s definitely something wrong with your face.’ It was as if someone had yanked the sky away and I was just staring at the void left behind. Like skipping over a spelling error in an otherwise smooth-flowing sentence. My brain filled in the information that it couldn’t truly see. ‘I shaved my beard off,’ he finally said, pointing to his nude, soft face, and I said: ‘Dad, are you drunk again?’

He was, but that’s irrelevant. The point is I dropped further from the testosterone tree than my dad did. I have a full head of hair – and thank almighty Christ that I do, honestly, because without it I would be nothing – so I am already one up on the man who went bald at 19 and, 23 years later, sproinged me from his loins, but facial hair has for the entirety of my pubic life been my bane. I didn’t start shaving until I was 20, and it took a couple of years from that early scraping for a full filled-in face of stubble to occur. I stopped clean-shaving years ago because I have such a soft babyish face that I quite visibly revert to childhood when I do it, and off licences and bars stop serving me because they assume I am a preternaturally tall and confident sixth former trying to buy alcohol for his smaller and less pubescent classmates. I cannot grow a full beard because something in my genetic make-up won’t allow it: at some point my stubble grows long enough to be scruffy but not significant enough to comb together into a beard, so I just look like George Michael after a couple of days spent tangled in the Hampstead Heath toilets, RIP. Essentially my facial hair grows in a liminal space between boyhood and true manliness, and I’m fine with it, I’m fine with it, but also I’m very much not fine with it.

At 30, I tried to grow a moustache. I have always been a fan of moustaches, ever since the England goalkeeper David Seaman stopped a penalty against Scotland during Euro ’96 – the exact and precise, if you want to stop the universe and know exactly where it happened, moment I fell in love with football – and roared in celebration in a lurid yellow Umbro shirt and a lustrous brown moustache (before overarming the ball to Darren Anderton who set off the assist for the ensuing Gazza goal – truly, the greatest four minutes of football ever played in history). Tom Selleck had a moustache, sure, and about a hundred TV detectives, and also about 90% of sex offenders ever imprisoned in the UK or United States. But despite that they represent a sort of grizzled, world-weary version of manhood: a moustache says you are aged and wise, and know what a good cigar tastes like, and can fix or put up a shelf. Nobody is going to take a swing at a guy with a moustache, because they know he’s going to swing right back. In an active hostage situation, are you (the bank robber) going to try and put a gun to the head of the dude rocking a ’stache? Like hell you are. You just fucking know that guy knows medium-to-basic kung fu, and will take the weapon off you before you can blink. The last few milliseconds of your life – as the bullet slowly crashes your skull apart, out from the back of it – will be spent thinking, ‘I never should have underestimated the moustachioed man.’ I had to have one.

Sadly, this took weeks. I tried to under-arm the new, Moustache Me into existence: I grew my stubble out as far as it would go, so everyone assumed I was just having a sort of ungroomed mental health break, then shaved down the sides and chin – just a little, just subtly – so the moustache area stood out a couple of millimetres more. At first, like my dad and the vacant beard, people noticed but didn’t notice: ‘Your face looks more … ginger,’ they would say, pointing to the curious orange-redness around my mouth, as if I had been sucking frenziedly from a rusted tap. ‘There’s something … red about you.’ I was kissing a girl in the red-pink glow of her bedroom after midnight and she pulled away, her arms still around me, and said sweetly: ‘This tickles and we have to stop.’ About three weeks later, one Friday, everything fell into place: ‘Are you … growing a moustache?’ three separate people asked me, and I told them: yes. ‘Why?’ they would say, and I ignored them. I felt manly for the first time in my life. I felt robust, like I could fix a motorcycle. Like I could hit the president over the head with a folded chair. Like I could be a medium-to-high famous Hollywood actor in seventies America. Like I could go into space and come back without choking in the vacuum of it, without my lungs exploding.

Life with a moustache was good, for a while. I took to nibbling on it when I was bored or thinking. I would flick at the long edges of it when I was watching TV. I’ve never smoked but always envied that smokers have something cool-looking to do with their fingers – they are always twirling a cigarette from one knuckle to another, or flicking and un-flicking a Zippo lighter, or unfolding a Rizla paper and rolling it up tight – and now I finally had something to occupy myself: an orangutan-red half-moustache that sort of looked like I was getting ready to go to my first prom with it. Then one day I woke up and looked at myself in a mirror and realised: ah, no. Good god, no. I looked like a substitute manager at a regional branch of CeX. Like I took Game Workshop very seriously as an adult. I looked like I had a 500-yard forbidden zone around every primary school in the country. Like I had opinions about motherboards that I express on special motherboard forums. I looked, as a man, as if I collected replica swords.

It had to go. I felt nothing as I trimmed it down to the nub. Five weeks of ludicrous experimental growing, gone. The switch from ‘ah, this moustache is good!’ to ‘get the horrid hair off my face’ was not unlike the ugly feeling of regret you have after masturbating alone: shut the laptop lid, close out all the squalid porn, shave your moustache off and moisturise the area beneath. My upper lip was dry and caked with a dry skin residue under there. My face suddenly looked vacant without the addition of a third eyebrow. I started to detach from reality a little: if my face wasn’t my face with the moustache, and it wasn’t my face without it, then where did my face go? Who … am I? And then I realised that I’m a man who cannot experiment with the way his head and skull looks, at all. I can never pierce an eyebrow or get a teardrop tattoo. I am very dependent on my lustrous hairline and without it I look foolish. That I, too, don’t have a discernible face, much like my dad: that I am a collection of notable features, mushed onto a sort of plain canvas backdrop. I learned a lot about myself, growing a moustache for a little bit. I learned a lot about who I am as much as who I am not. I am not, it turns out, capable of having a moustache.