It's here again already. The clocks have gone back. The Premier League has degenerated into familiar sourness. Most leaves are off the trees and Movember has come round again. As of this morning, cancer-conscious men around the world are starting to grow their annual moustache to help raise awareness and research cash for prostate, testicular and other bloke-ish cancers. It is the pink ribbon moment for the upper lip.

The idea, which has been spreading since 2004, is that by growing a 'tache for the month of November, men will endure mockery for their unsuccessful and unsuitable efforts – most of them – but in doing so will open up conversations about stuff, the kind of ailments blokes don't usually talk about. Um, er, you know what I mean. Did you watch the match last night?

Obama strategist David Axelrod has pledged to shave off his moustache if Mitt Romney wins in Minnesota, Michigan or Pennsylvania. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images

But men who already sport a moustache can't join in. They feel as excluded as women do in Movember. They react in different, sometimes contrarian ways. So Barack Obama's legendary Chicago strategist, David Axelrod, has threatened to shave off his own mustache (Americans shave off that o) if clean-shaven Mitt Romney wins battleground states, Minnesota, Michigan or Pennsylvania in next Tuesday's election. He'll do it live on air too: reality TV in the raw.

What follows here are 10 little nuggets about moustaches which I've learned after four decades in the furry upper lip business.

1. You have to decide "why am I doing this?" Is this moustache going to be a fashion statement or there for practical reasons? In my case it was a fashioned statement. I grew it a mere three years (trendy or what?) after the Beatles issued their 1967 Sergeant Pepper LP, complete with drooping moustaches of the kind previously associated with Hollywood's idea of a Chinese opium dealer. Mine drooped all the way from the sub-nostril region to just above my jaw line.

2. There again, there were also practical reasons that have helped keep me loyal to my moustache. I have a tiny blemish on the upper-right quartile that cuts easily when razored. I also have a small mouth, so my new moustache helped hold my face up and make me look more grown-up than I felt in the rough world of the London Evening Standard's newsroom.

3. I had tried a full beard in my student days but cut it off after Maggie Leslie, a chum in the history department at UCL, said: "The trouble with your beard, Mike, is that it looks like pubic hair." This was wounding, also true. They can't say that about a moustache (can they?).

4. At some point in the early 80s, friends started asking me why I still bothered to keep parting my hair when there wasn't a lot left to part. On closer inspection I realised I had been living with a tonsured monk – me. Asked why she hadn't told me, my wife replied: "I knew it would upset you." At least I beat Neil Kinnock in abandoning my comb-over. But the moustache obviously became more precious: it wouldn't let me down.

5. Or perhaps it would. As moustaches receded in response to Thatcherite cuts I realised that I had a weakness around the right lip, a bit that wouldn't grow right, like a patch of lawn under a tree. It had been covered by luxurious foliage during the Keynesian years of expansion. In consequence my moustache is often slightly – only slightly, I hope – one-sided.

Not Michael White. Photograph: BBC/PA

6. I soon learned that people are more likely to remember your face if you have a moustache. On the rare occasions when I bump into Edwina Currie these days, she always says: "Hi, Trevor." When taxi drivers also mistake me for Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun (bald, moustache, talks on the telly about politics – it's a sort-of fit), I praise Shirley Williams and don't tip him. It is worse being blamed by a passersby for Britain's 1987 hurricane. As in: "Hi, Mike. What's the weather going to be like tomorrow?" (bald, moustache, unfashionably dressed, must be Michael Fish).

7. Not everyone is so observant. The last time I shaved it off as a gentle experiment with changing times, I waited for six anguished days for my wife's verdict. In the end I said: "Have you noticed anything different?" "No." She is a very caring person, all the same (see 4 above).

No staying power … Richard Norton Taylor and Jonathan Steele

8. There comes a time when it becomes obvious – even to someone like me – that moustaches have moved on, as 70s fashion statements do, mostly to oblivion. It has also become a cartoonist's cliché that bald men sporting moustaches are all gay. Do I care? No, happy to show solidarity, real or imagined. By this time mine is quite short, military even. At the Guardian, hopeless fashion victims like Jonathan Steele and Richard Norton-Taylor who have given up and gone clean-shaven. Wimps!

9. Martyrdom duly follows. During a public spat with Quentin Letts, Stakhanovite parliamentary sketch-writer of the Daily Mail, on a matter of collegiate loyalty, he abuses my moustache in print as sinister, pencil-like, worthy of a British Rail ticket collector or that German chap who shouted so much. A low blow. The moustache and I retain our dignity.

10. Long after what was left of my hair had gone white, the moustache still looks vaguely brown, even youthful in poor light. But when I have spent any time in the sun it starts to look very white in contrast to my skin. On one such occasion I bumped into Paddy Ashdown, whom I have known for decades. "When did you grow a moustache?" barked the former trained killer from the special boat squad. "Forty years ago, Paddy." They don't miss much, these trained killers, do they? It's not even as if we're married (see 7 above). But the nose scarf and I are old comrades. It keeps my upper lip warm and snug as Movember nights draw in yet again. Yet again we rise above all. See you in December.