It's All in the Genes

Ask me how much I care about the royals. Not a fig.

However, I did get trapped into watching a little of the recap of the wedding-do this morning; long enough to note that Prince Will is losing his hair, like his daddy. Prince Harry is not, like his daddy.

I am not moralizing. 'Twas ever thus. All the the royal beds of Europe have been very, very busy over the centuries with visiting layabouts. Extra-curricular shagging probably is the only solution to the perils of inbreeding.

But getting back to Harry, I was stuffing a turkey Thanksgiving morning in 1984 and listening to a chatty radio broadcast announcing the two-month-old princeling had little tufts of red hair.

This benign observation was fast followed by a list of justifications for this apparently innocent phenomenon. The assurances that red hair has, over the years, surfaced on the royal pates of family members on both sides had a salacious undertone in view of the unneedfulness of an explanation. Who needed to be assured that it was all right?

Not I. I didn't care. I still don't.

Ever since marriage was invented there have been those who automatically count out the required nine months when a couple reproduces in the first year. These same people also have an eye for discerning any lack of paternal influence on the looks of the newborn. Mama's baby; daddy's maybe?

The conjecture will always be there but today we have more than that, don't we. Science has prevailed and a lot of fun is done!

In these sophisticated times, combing and brushing one's pedigree can be a chancey, if not an iffy, thing in all quarters since DNA has reared its spoilsport head!