David Walliams, Sara Cox and The QI Elves

From Laura Marks, a campaigner for social action and interfaith relationships.
When my husband was a student, way back in the day, he grew a moustache. This unnecessarily underlined, in his own words, an already well defined, and let’s face it, delightfully Jewish, nose. Luckily by the time I met him the moustache was long gone, the nose blending into his face, where to this day, and quite rightly, it belongs. Fast forward to our family zoom this week when our youngest, Raphi’s smiling face appeared from Dublin where he studies. Newly, and largely clean shaven Raphi was now sporting a sweeping, luscious handlebar moustache, leaving him looking something like a Jewish, Fu Manchu cowboy. 
Moustaches have gone in and out of fashion over the years, but the new trend to grow one in Movember to highlight men’s health, most definitely places substance over stylishness. Raphi’s hairy start-point provides our family with a full month of photos and video calls as it grows longer, then gets trimmed back, shaped, coloured and preened with jells and wax. Four days in, and splashed over social media, it’s already being used by family and friends as an object of fun and frivolity. But of course there is nothing frivolous about men’s health, physical or mental. Raphi, who has battled his own mental health challenges, told me that suicide is the number one killer of young men. 
Heartbreakingly, research shows that whilst 70% of men say their friends can rely on them for support, only 48% say they rely on their friends. In Judaism, the Talmud teaches, “A person who saves a single life, saves the entire world”. I’m proud of Raphi, in that Jewish mother sort of way, for helping to spotlight something so real, and tangible, the avoidable premature deaths of young men. Whilst I’m not able to grow a stylish moustache, lockdown offers me nonetheless the opportunity, to watch my unmanaged eyebrows, yet again, take over my face. I will of course, make a donation to a men’s mental health charity whilst, and not by choice, I join my family in this frenzy of facial hair.