Incoming mail - a hat in the ring for a KG

A curiosity of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, the escutcheon visited only hours ago, is that its lineage goes back to the middle of the same century to which the English Cocker Spaniel traces its own - not that anyone on the planet, save our happy few, appreciates this dazzling correlation.

The 14th Century was evidently a good one for tonsorial flamboyancy, to which I think the world remains unanimously drawn in the featherings of a fine scrounger for woodcock and sandcrabs, if less consistently so in KG's. That said, I hazarded an inquiry to a reader this morning, on whether one had unearthed another portrait (L) of the KG discussed on the 13th, guessing that not very many people would be so self-effacing as to conceal a brow to which a refining benevolence must certainly have been extended.

I suppose one deserved the answer which was returned in the afternoon post in monochrome, tending to undermine one's somewhat prayerful hope that the eradication of the nobler properties of any face had not become a custom, while one was out at the beach.

An inconvenient feature of any life conducted with inattention to our media is not only the assumption that everyone is still parsing his way through Horace and savouring martinis of gin, but the discovery that hair, per se, is being cultivated as volubly in one's own species as in its better. I'm not sure that I welcomed this tossing of a hat into the ring for a KG, either, naïve as it surely would be, to suppose the honour to be above campaigning.

But one learns from the times. I set about, this evening, specifying terms of a search engine to comb the known world of forelock cultivation, and found it invading even the innocent world of the parallel bars, where I let the matter rest.