Polly Hudson’s article (Beards may be dirtier than toilets – but all men should grow one, 3 July) is right on the entire, besides within the assumption that each one males can achieve this. Once I was a toddler, my dad spent a two-week vacation not shaving and ended up with a 5 o’clock shadow. By coincidence, my uncle grew a bushy forest on his face throughout the identical interval. Confronted with my uncle’s success, my dad promptly shaved his personal try off and it was by no means spoken of once more.
Years later, I used to be bewildered by my dad’s actually fairly hostile response after I efficiently gave facial hair a go for the primary time. Then I remembered.
David Grey
Birmingham
My late husband had a beard once we met in 1966, and I solely noticed him clean-shaven in previous pictures. It was a full beard, befitting a geologist who had frolicked within the discipline with no mirror. It was regarded with suspicion by Scottish farmers; one even supplied to shear him together with his sheep. On the time, beards have been related to artists and revolutionaries. My aunts, on first assembly Jack, summed him up as “very good, contemplating he has a beard”.
Susan Treagus
Didsbury, Manchester
Polly Hudson writes: “All males look higher with beards and I’ll die on that hill.” Maybe Keith Flett’s Beard Liberation Front may take into account awarding her honorary life membership.
Toby Wooden
Peterborough
Most, if not all, males have beards. It’s simply that the clever ones don’t hassle to scrape hair from their face every single day. A pointless pastime.
Ronnie Macleod
Aberporth, Ceredigion