... with the GEM Micromatic Flying Wing
The Brush: Simpson's Trafalgar T3 synthetic
The Cream: Cella Crema Da Barba
The Razor: GEM Micromatic Flying Wing SE razor
The Balm: Nivea Men (sensitive)
The Shave:
I wasn't planning on making quite as big a deal out of this shave as I'm about to. In fact, the most I was going to do with it was simply post the above photo onto various Facebook shaving-related pages and the DAVESHAVES instagram page - like I do with quite a few of my daily shaves - and leave it at that. However, this shave is in memory of my mother Margaret. She wasn't a wet shaver* but today (2nd March 2020) marks what would have been her 86th birthday. Cella shaving cream and a GEM Micromatic Flying Wing SE razor. It's what she would have wanted.
It seems like an appropriate time to put into writing some of my memories of her, which I went over in my mind as I lathered up and performed a three-pass shave. Unfortunately - but probably somewhat inevitably - these memories are of her in her final months, but they're what I'd have liked to talk about at her funeral, had I had a) the nerve and b) the mental distance to do so. The thing is, funerals - certainly funerals for one's parents - aren't the best places for razor-sharp mental focus, so it probably wasn't a case of me not having the nerve. More of a case of not being able to fully concentrate on anything very much at all for longer than three minutes at the time**, so the idea of standing up in front of people and trying to put everything into words was somewhat beyond me.
Mum was diagnosed in January 2018 with vascular dementia. We (my sister and I) were well aware that all was not well by this point, so the diagnosis wasn't exactly a surprise. The following ten months until November 2018, when she finally passed away, are, for me, defined by phone calls from my mother - endless and persistent telephone calls - that were so many in number that they filled up my sister's voicemail. I remember counting the number of times mum called me one day and it amounted to 23***, all more or less about the same thing, which was her carers not having turned up when they were supposed to, even though they had. Vascular dementia being what it is, mum had simply forgotten they'd been.
Early on, to illustrate just how insane the voicemail messages were getting, my sister sent me a sound file of one of them. Listening to it was the emotional equivalent of being hit in the face with a demolition ball. I found it so devastating that I did the only thing I could think of to cushion the blow: I turned the message into a dance track, complete with Euro-pop keyboards and drums. I suppose some people would view this act as uncaring and callous, but it helped me to cope with an increasingly difficult situation. The sound of her weary, confused voice coupled with a stupidly jaunty backing track made the whole situation a little easier to bear. Plus, it was quite a good tune. I'm sure mum would have been delighted at the thought of clubbers having it large in Ibiza to the sound of her confused voice.
She once left a series of increasingly panic-stricken messages on my voicemail, asking me to call her back. The final message was her, desperate, asking who the actor in Jurassic Park was. When I finally got home I was in the process of calling her back when she rang me. 'Richard Attenborough!' she said, in a voice that made it sound like she'd found the Holy Grail or the secret of time travel. 'It was Richard Attenborough!' I'm glad she rang me first. I was going to tell her it was Jeff Goldblum.
Get her talking about World War 2, though, and she was spot on. She could remember in glorious detail when she was evacuated, and being taken to the countryside on the train by her uncle. She remembered a conversation she'd had on the train with a couple of soldiers, how she'd got them to pull down her suitcase from the luggage rack, much to the annoyance of her uncle who'd only just put it up there then nipped off to the bar for a swift one. Then, in the same breath, she'd start talking about a little girl she'd seen dancing in her living room the night before and it was hard to work out whether this was a hallucination conjured up through a combination of medication and lack of sleep or her rapidly failing memory playing tricks and throwing up images from the past.
It's down to mum, however, that both me and my sister have a love of reading and are happy to walk when others would get on a bus or jump in the car. She'd walk us up to Waterlow Park in north London, where we both grew up. We would walk to my grandmother's house from where we lived, too. It was probably a half-hour, forty-five minute walk, but at the time it seemed like hours would pass. She would take us both up into central London during the holidays and we'd spend the day traipsing up Oxford Street from Tottenham Court Road, until it was time to head towards Baker Street and the Polytechnic of Central London, where my dad worked. I told the minister in charge of the funeral service all of this so that she could weave a sort of biographical backbone into the proceedings. I also happened to mention that mum liked knitting. Just that. A sort of throwaway line. The minister, however, began the service by saying 'Margaret. She loved to knit. In a way, that's how she spent her life, isn't it? Knitting. Knitting a wooly net to keep her family close. She'd spend hours, knitting. She'd also spend hours walking her children up and down the streets of London. Which is good exercise.'****
There we have it. The Margaret Hopkins Memorial Shave, which I'm going to leave there as I could quite literally go on for hours. Normal service will be resumed in Dave's Shave #27. In closing, here's a photo of me and mum - her last photo, now that I think about it. It was her first and only selfie. I clearly hadn't shaved very well that day.
* Well, I say that. But maybe she was. In secret. Whispering 'don't tell the children' to my dad as she stropped her Thierrs-Issard 1937 Special Coiffeur straight razor.
** The time being December 2018. And for about six months afterwards.
*** I should add here that I wasn't normally the target for the phone calls. That joy went to my sister. Lucky her.
**** I'm actually not joking about this. I guess we should have been warned that the minister wasn't the ideal choice for the occasion when she started crying when the coffin was carried in to one of the tunes that my mum had chosen - during one of her more lucid moments - for the occasion.