Paper Monitor
11:27 UK time, Friday, 15 February 2013
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The Daily Telegraph letters page is .
Is facial hair a sign of the noble savage or classic phoney?
The beard camp comes out fighting. And Paper Monitor learns a new word - pogonophobia - for the haters. "Is the incidence of pogonophobia directly related to an inability to grow a beard?" Andrew J Fountain asks.
Some things are too good to be true. "Sir - I am sorry to learn that, after 35 years' commissioned service to the Crown, I am untrustworthy because I have grown a beard in retirement (Letters, February 14)," writes Colonel Philip Barry (retd). A bona fide retired colonel in the Telegraph - you couldn't make it up.
He is irked that a fellow reader has called into question beard growers' integrity. His decision to sprout is nothing more than a desire to protect his skin after "so many years of assault by razor-blade", he explains.
The theory that beards are associated with cowards in the Great War is bayonetted by another reader. "This cannot be true. We had a bearded monarch, George V, and Jack Tar, a member of the more successful service for most of that war, was on every Player's cigarette packet with a 'full set'."
But the beard love-in can only be allowed to go on so long. "I have always believed that men who grew beards did so because a) they were too lazy to shave; b) they wanted to cover their acne; c) they wanted to look like Jesus," a naysayer from Surrey writes.
Paper Monitor would add d) they live in Dalston and own a fixed gear bicycle.
A reader in Berkhamsted has the last word. Reminiscing about the only white minister in Kenyatta's governing party - yes this is the Telegraph, chaps - he recalls a conversation at the Nakuru club. An old buffer is heard to exclaim of the politician's mutton-chops: "I wouldn't trust him. Looks like a weasel peering out of a bull's bottom."
And there you have it. Perfidious facial hair, the perils of decolonisation. Sundowners all round!
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