Dear Dolly (David Finnigan)

Q. Dear Dolly, I am a fifteen-year-old. I have lots of guy friends but I have never had a boyfriend or been kissed. Do the pubes ever stop growing?
A. Dear Fifteen, no the pubes never stop growing. When the incorruptible body of St Augustine was found, more than a thousand years after his death, his pubic hairs had grown through the lid of his coffin, up through the earth and out into the sunshine. Peter of Brussels, in his 1605 Treatise, describes the discovery:
“The villagers of Antwerp were sore distressed by a gruesome Thicket, which somefuch had naught but tangled black vines and a grim prospect. Most perplexing was the ravishing of some young Maidens, who had stumbled into the tangled vines and been put to a regrettable Disadvantage, also to their Fathers and Brothers who bemoaned their loss of Purity. When the villagers took unto the woods with an Axe, they were shocked to hear a Moaning, as if of a living beast. Upon the advice of that most wise Priest [Peter’s mentor Cuthbert of Toulouse], the villagers uprooted the vines and located the source of the Thicket, which to their amazement took root in the Genitalia of a corpse. That Incomparable Father of Knowledge [Cuthbert again] swiftly identified him as Saint Augustine, whom we thought rather to have been dwelling in the City of God these last thirteen centuries.”