Ginger beards....
... not too many laughs here, I'm afraid, but all true... ginger jokes can be a good thing.

I have brown hair but a ginger beard. It's not all ginger but enough so that my one and only attempt to grow it was met with sufficient ridicule that I never tried again. Turns out this runs in the family:

About 3 years ago now, my brother was dying. He'd had a dodgy mole taken off his back a few years before which turned out to be a melanoma and it had come back somewhere unexpected. Shit! So after a rapid decline we reach what is unquestionably the worst day of my life - I have to watch my little brother die at the age of 31.

Now we had known things were not going well for a few weeks but it had all escalated quite suddenly and one of his friends had travelled over to visit that day not expecting that it would be his last. By the time they arrived he was completely under and fading fast so they saw him but didn't get to speak to him.

A few hours later the world has ended and we're back at my, by then, late-brother's house, with his wife, trying to work out why the gravity is still working and the sky hasn't fallen in yet. His mate then turns to me and says "the bugger only went and died before we could rip the piss out of that ginger beard". Of course he'd never grown a beard before, but when you know all the lights will be going out soon, shaving is not too high on your priorities.

Now I don't advocate cruelty to gingers in the normal scheme of things, but if you can raise a smile on the very worst of days, then it can't be all bad. And my brother would only have been sorry that he missed the chance to rip back.
( Ugi , it's a game of give and cake, Fri 26 Feb 2010, 18:46, Reply)