'The curse of the stolen hog bristles'

We have all heard of skeletons in the cupboard. Well prepare to discover all your ancestors heinous crimes courtesy of a web site instigated by the famous Old Bailey court house in London. Just punch in a name and be ready for a shock. I did just that and am completely mortified and ashamed to declare that on 10th June 1801 a certain Thomas Glasse was indicted for feloniously stealing, ‘three pounds weight of hogs bristles to the value of eight shillings.’ Now I am convinced that in this world things tend to catch up with you. It’s a case of an eye for an eye or in this instance a bristle for a bristle. When I considered the ramifications of such a dastardly crime, I came to the awful conclusion that the injured party, a certain, ’John Allen, brush maker’, could well have been of a mind, in his moment of distress, to lay a hex on future generations of the Glasse family.
Being a Glasse it was my job to see us through the dilemma.
I spent some time reflecting.
It is a bald fact that as men get older their hair has a habit of fleeing the cranium. This phenomenon is often counteracted by ever increasing, voluminous amounts of bristles sprouting forth upon the eyebrows. If you happened to be driving in our little New Zealand town of Whakatane last week you may have witnessed an attack upon a local officer of the law (who just happens to be my son in law) Apparently his eyebrows had become so bushy that his whole family wrestled him to the ground and well and truly plucked him like a chicken. Was he a victim of the curse of the hogs bristles? It got me thinking.
Has my brother Rotundo (named after my Italian Mother’s maiden name) fallen foul of something that happened over two hundred years ago?
Under the pretext of checking a suspicious looking mole just behind his left ear, I was staggered to see veritable bush reserves flowing from his auditory canal. Copious clumps of unruly ear fuz appeared to be multiplying faster than the mangroves in Ohiwa harbour. I realised that Rotundo was so concerned with the diminishing foliage on his head that he had not noticed the increasing hairiness elsewhere. The situation was desperate. I sent a coded message to the family, ‘We need to spend a day at the orifice, hair today, gone tomorrow’ The family took immediate action, purchased a weed whacker from the hardware store, ambushed the hairy one and proceeded to blaze a trail through the undergrowth. It was like venturing where men fear to tread, we discovered things that were missing, presumed dead. Rotty’s school cap, half a pair of sun glasses, a man with a stop/go sign, an ear wig and a sizable piece of Ruby Wax.
As we hacked our way toward my brother’s brain, for no apparent reason, our thoughts went to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.
Imagine how delighted we were when both ears were completely free of bristly impediments and by shining a penlight into his, now naked lughole, we could illuminate the clock on the opposite wall. The battle was almost done but one further challenge presented itself. Nothing gets up peoples noses more than hairs. Many famous identities have had moderately hairy noses, Nostraldamus, Snozzal Durante, Goobychev to name a few. Rotundo, had enough wiggly spiders legs up there to furnish Ruud the bug man with a whole season of TV shows. They just had to go. With the immortal words, ‘Beam me up Snotty’ on our lips, we got to work. As each follicle was tweazered out tears fell from my brother’s eyes, visible proof that at last he can breathe easy, released from the curse of the stolen hogs bristles.