Kmflett's Blog

Beard Liberation Front

29^th March

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

Michael Rosen has been changed by COVID but his beard has remained resilient say campaigners

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that despite the terrible impact of COVID on the author and Arsenal fan Michael Rosen, his beard has remained resilient, almost throughout.

In his new book, Many Different Kinds of Love, on his hospitalisation with COVID in March 2020 and his gradual recovery, he includes extracts from the patient diary that nurses wrote for him every day during his stay in a North London ICU.

The entry for 6^th May 2020, written by a nurse, Holly, notes in part:

we also shaved your beard. Sorry, we know you usually have a beard, that’s just so we can keep the area around your trachy..clean.

The campaigners say they were aware of the shaving incident which was fully understood and indeed in line with BLF COVID guidelines.

Michael Rosen went on to be voted Joint Beard of the Year 2020 with Michael Sheen and he remains hirsute.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett, we admire the restraint of Michael Rosen in only including one mention of his award winning beard in the book. It is however a powerful record of what the last year has meant and the importance of the NHS and those who work in it to so many.

BBC report

The former children’s laureate, poet and Michael Rosen, has begun writing again after suffering a near fatal Covid infection last year, which involved him being put into an induced coma for seven weeks.

The celebrated poet and author’s new book, Many Different Kinds of Love, includes parts of the “patient diary” intensive care nurses wrote for him as part of a strategy to help coma patients recover psychologically.

“It helps me understand what actually happened,” the author, 74, tells BBC Breakfast.

“Recovery is very, very strange because there are two people – there’s me before I got all this stuff, and then me afterward. And I keep wrestling with whether they’re the same person or not… I guess I have to come to terms with that.”

BBC news 18^th March 2021

Vote for Beard of Spring 2021

Beard of Spring 2021 Final vote. In this extraordinary period, the Beard Liberation Front expects there to be several 'Beards of Spring' rather than an outright 'winner'

— keith flett (@kmflett) March 28, 2021