Watch it! He's got a blade

A year or so ago, I had an urge - springtime and all that - to up my machismo and start wielding a proper razor. OK, not an open cut-throat, there are limits (mind you, I'd like a go with one, but perhaps that's just the ted in me).

I'd never shaved with anything other than a cartridge head thing, if that's even what they're called. You get charged a fortune for a bubble pack of plasticky bobbins each with two, no three, no twelve blades. Yeah, right. I got fed up with the marketing shite and the fact that I was needlessly chucking plastic into landfill, and that my only bit of 'grooming' was based around this freakish bit of twoddle apparently designed by some bloke still obsessed with Star Wars.

So, a quick mooch around the web for ideas and recommendations, not least at Badger & Blade, a site I soon realised is the home of the world's shaving obsessives and fetishists, and I opted for this beauty. It's a DE89 made in Sheffield, England by Edwin Jagger and just picking the thing up is a joy, a weighty tool that feels like it'll last into the next century. It took a bit of getting used to, not furnished with a swanky swivel head and having more heft than a piece of wet celery, and it would have been ironic if a face forever disfigured by cack-handed early efforts would need to be covered for the rest of my life by an extensive beard, but it was a bloodless coup.

And the price of this hi-chrome dominator? A bit over twenty quid. MP