“You have right hairy fingers,” the postman said to Timothy, prompting him to look at his hands hastily. He was always concerned about people knowing about his hobbies, and forgot that the postman was a closet hair cultivator like himself. The pinkie ring sporting a hair silhouette told him that he too was a member of SSHAVE – the Secret Society of Hair Arable and Vanity Extortion.

Still, he was alarmed that the postman even managed to see his work, as his doorway was so often bolted shut to keep out the troublesome youths.

Timothy had spent his life on the pursuit of hirsute.

Today, he’d forgotten to bolt the door; He had been preoccupied with his latest exciting project. He was sitting in the back room working on his autumn collection; a recent spate of ginger hair he had gleaned a few weeks back from his friends on the internet chatrooms.

He had to pretend to be the love of their life to convince them to send over a few centimetres of their hair. It was slow work, but boy was it worth it. Ginger hair could fetch a fortune with today’s lackadaisical and disorganised breeding patterns.

“Why should I be ashamed”, he thought to himself. “I’m the helper of people everywhere”. And he was. He grew the hair in his walled garden out of sight of anybody and he sold it to wig makers everywhere. He donated it to charities, even.

But the shame came back when he tried to gather up samples of hair from ‘normal’ society to plant.

He had recently stopped putting classified ads in the local papers for people to send him the hair in their shower drains. People took that up the wrong way. They thought it was ‘weird’.

But what was really weird, Timothy thought, was that people would unknowingly and willingly let a massive source of revenue go to waste. Imagine, he thought, the amount of people with hair in their shower drainps, blissfully ignorant of the true potential it carried.

He often sat staring into his walled garden at night, wishing he could open up one of the large tractor sized gate and watch as the hair blew in the soft autumn breeze, but alas, one could never be sure of the people looking to sabotage him.

One group of people in particular had caused him difficulty, the cult of the God of the Bearded Man. Only they knew, and SSHAVE know the real power that lies in men’s beards. They seeked to cause anarchy in the world through beardedness so that only the beardiest beard could bear a beard, as their God, a big busted woman with a rocking beard, could slap them a high five.

The cult had been around since Shakespearian times, rewriting the text of Macbeth so that it appeared as if his wife caused his power hungriness – it was not her, it was his beard that he had grown when he was out fighting battles with the lads.

They had convinced Gillette to make their shaving utensils extortionately expensive in order to deter people from shaving. They had been the driving force behind the hipster movement, placing them strategically in artsy areas of cities and ordering them to “chill bro, clean shaven-ness is too mainstream”.

They sent him samples of hair in the post, but they were always beard duds – beard hair is like a weed, it kills the regular hair it grows beside. That’s why so often bald men can sport big beards. They do it carelessly, and suffer the consequences.

But Timothy was never fooled by this, he could see the curliness and wispiness of it immediately and disposed of it in his furnace without a second thought.

They didn’t cause him too much bother any more – but alarmingly, it was because of the global resurgence they had been seeing. They had bigger fish to fry.