Desperate, I considered pasting onto my chest a poultice of Dynamic Lifter; or, at last resort, the purchase of a chest wig. The chest wig I rejected due to the cost; the Dynamic Lifter due to the quite incredible smell.

As the seventies wore on, the hair on every bloke’s head became progressively longer and less restrained. Some attempted sideburns, beards, even mutton chops. Chest hair, if it could be summoned up, was proudly displayed—framed in the V-for-victory of a partially unbuttoned body shirt. Women, too, threw away their blades and let hair joyfully sprout from their legs and underarms. With every year that passed, the country became hairier. By 1976, it appeared the nation would soon resemble Cousin It from The Addams Family, with severe consequences for road safety.

Finally, through dint of effort, some time around my early twenties I achieved a small fuzz on the upper lip and just enough chest hairs to award them individual names. (‘Hi Trevor’, ‘Hi Douglas’, ‘Hi Angelique’.) And now, years on, right at the end of the summer holidays, I have finally graduated to the mo—and with it the yearned-for masculinity.

Some strangers wander up and join our cricket game. They must think of me as a mustachioed man, and of Jocasta as a woman who habitually wears pink nail polish. I find this strangely appealing. One of the newcomers takes up the bat and hooks the ball skywards. It arcs up high, sits for a moment and then heads down towards me. There’s an eternity in which to position myself and contemplate the catch. For me, this signals disaster: the more time I have to think about a catch, the more time my mind has to catalogue all the ways in which I’ll drop it.

As the ball falls, I remember the time when I was the assistant coach of Batboy’s baseball team. Steve, the coach, would put me on first base and try to teach the boys the rules of the game. ‘The batter,’ he’d explain, ‘runs towards first base, and at the same I throw the ball—really fast and hard—towards Richard like this…’

There’d be a pause as they all watched the ball travel towards me.

‘Yeah, OK, well let’s just imagine he caught it,’ Steve would say, brightly. ‘If he’d caught it, that runner would then be out.’

Back at the beach, I can feel everyone watching me. Never before has a ball moved so slowly; so precisely towards a waiting fielder. It must be the easiest catch in the history of beach cricket. I scrunch up my eyes, jerk my arms into the air and feel the ball drop perfectly into my hands. ‘Great catch,’ someone yells. I breathe out, and give the moustache an appreciative rub. The thicker the mo gets, the more my play resembles that of a young Dennis Lillee.

‘I think it’s changed your personality,’ says Jocasta that night, as she changes her nail polish colour to an electric sapphire blue. ‘What happened to the man I shacked up with—incompetent, self-pitying, hopeless at games and unable to control his drinking? Frankly, I’d got used to that guy.’

Maybe she has a point. What sort of guy has a moustache? Not a guy like me. The mo has to go. So does her nail polish, and the magazine with Viggo. The next morning, the last day of our holidays, I shave the thing off. Almost instantly, my nose returns to its normal size. We have a final game of beach cricket with Jocasta bowling, her toes reassuringly unadorned.