I'll take up the tuba instead.

CLASHING HORNS

I was idly wondering why the cor anglais has a French name meaning ‘English horn’, and the French horn has an English name meaning… well, ‘French horn’. I looked it up, even though I knew there would just be some reasonable but rather dull explanation.

There isn’t. There is a completely bonkers explanation, in both cases. Here’s the first.

So. The cor anglais isn’t English, or French. But that’s nothing, because another thing it isn’t is… a horn. It’s basically an overgrown oboe, and it’s from Silesia. But being thin with a bulb on the end, it looks a little like the trumpets angels are shown playing in medieval art.

Parp

Or at least it did to the Germans, who started calling it the Engellisches Horn, or angel’s horn. Can you see the hilarious misunderstanding that’s about to happen? Well, that happened. The Italians thought the Germans called it the English Horn, so they translated it to corno inglese. The French got it from the Italians, and called it the cor anglais. The British got it from the French, and presumably stared at it, thought ‘We can’t call that an English horn! It’s nothing to do with us, we’ve only just this minute seen one!’ …and I suppose decided just to keep the French name to save embarrassment.¹

But that is rationality itself compared to what happened with the “French” horn. Just you wait.

NEWS AND ADS

The Researcher’s First Murder.

My box of postcards / murder mystery / very hard puzzle is now fully available all over the place, everywhere from David to Goliath, and in between.

Some of the picture sides of the postcards, looking straight-forward and solvable.

JF Among Others

My two person sketch show is now sold out for Cambridge, but we have a new date: Thursday the 16th January at the Komedia in Brighton. Once again, it will feature me and my favourite of the rest of the Souvenir Programme cast. Once again, it’ll be a different favourite from the favourites who did Ludlow and Cambridge. I’m very fickle.

Tall Tales

If you can’t wait till then, on Tuesday the 24th September, I’ll be trying out a version of something brand new as part of Tall Tales, an excellent story-telling night at the North London Tavern in Kilburn. It starts at 8, ends by 10, and is only £5. Email talltalesnight@gmail.com for tickets.

Build the wall!

Now then. I’m going to turn on paid subs next time, because as we saw over the summer, I won’t do this regularly otherwise. But I don’t want anyone to feel priced out, so what I’m going to do is put a paywall two thirds of the way down. So, Thrifty Squadron will continue to get the First Bit; News and Ads; Sketch Book; Commentary Box and the Small Silly Thing At The End for free. Then Extravagent Squadron will bid them a fond farewell, and go on to The Second Bit, and a new thing I’m going to start doing: The Unseen Bit of Writing Bit. (I am very good at naming things.) This might be a preview of something new I’ve just written (especially when I’m in sketch-writing mode, I imagine), or something that was cut from something I’ve already written, or a bit I especially like from one of the many, many things I’ve written that for one reason or another never got made. In this way, I hope still to be giving plenty away for nothing, but also something that I hope is worth having, for something. (The something is $8, or about £6, a month, because that was the default Substack picked, and I assume they know what they’re doing.) Here’s where to sign up if you like, or indeed to un-sign if you pledged a while ago, but have now sobered up.

SKETCH BOOK

COMMENTARY BOX on

Dry as a Cuckoo

Re Sherlock Holmes Not Understanding How Bicycles Work. Simon Tanner thinks Conan Doyle’s original theory was actually correct. Well, fair enough - so did Holmes. But I think it was wrong, and so did Conan Doyle.

GA points out that in fact there is a mathematical way of finding out direction of travel from overlapping tracks. But not the one Holmes used.

Paul Johnson and Tealin, approaching from different angles (it was not possible to determine their directions) both wonder about the treads of the tires. These did exist at the time, and Holmes even mentions them:

“A bicycle, certainly, but not the bicycle,” said he. “I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres. This, as you perceive, is a Dunlop, with a patch upon the outer cover. Heidegger’s tyres were Palmer ’s, leaving longitudinal stripes.”

…But they don’t seem to help him with the direction, possibly because the tire could be put on the wheel either way round.

Re Conan Doyle generally, Richard Jones tells a great story about his wife’s family’s association with him which is too long to quote here, but is worth a look.

Re Erik Satie’s directions (Sorry I called him Eric last week) Lev Parikian, The Airport’s resident music and ornithology expert, says:

I *love* Satie’s directions. Another favourite is the enigmatic direction at the beginning of Einojuahi Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus: ‘think of autumn and Tchaikovsky’.

THIS IS WHAT I MEAN BY ‘SMALL SILLY THING AT THE END’

Look, the grieving process is a strange thing, and it takes us all in different ways. Stay strong, this ticket machine.

SITE OF FUTURE WALL

…And this is the point at which we would say good-bye to Thrifty Squadron, if I’d turned the pay-wall on yet. Which I haven’t. But I forgot to pass on the airport’s love last week, so I’ll do it twice this week, to show how it’ll work.

Love,

The Airport.

BRASS NECK

Right. The French horn. It isn’t French, or English… but it is a horn. So that’s something. (In fact, horn players just call it ‘the horn’, and they wish you would too, but they can’t make you.) This story is simpler than the cor anglais one, but even more gloriously stupid.

The French were famous for making beautiful hunting-horn type horns: curly tubes that made a nice noise when you blew through them. Then the Germans came up with a more complicated horn with slides and crooks and valves and what-have-you.² So British horn players started calling the horns they played in orchestras French Horns, to make it clear they were having nothing to do with those funny looking new German horns with all the bits hanging off them. But the thing is… slides and crooks and valves and what-have-you are a really good idea. You can play tunes with them and everything. So, before long, in a brilliantly British combination of ruthless pragmatism and equally ruthless face-saving, British horn players were playing German horns… but still calling them French horns.

In summary then: the cor anglais, or English horn, is a Silesian oboe that the Italians thought the Germans thought was English, but the Germans actually thought looked angelic. Whereas the French horn is a German horn that the British called the French horn to distinguish it from the German horn… which is what it is.

All clear? Good. Carry on.

FROM THE VAULT

This poem was written and recorded for Souvenir Programme Series Nine, The One With The Family. It was a postcard written by Jerry to a friend after his Covid-19 vaccination, but I cut it partly because we’d already dealt with that moment in his life, and also because it was written down, and so the character would have had to, as it were, read it out specially for us, which felt wrong. All the other poems and songs in the series are one way or another performed within the world of the show.

The poem is a ridiculously over-complicated verse form called a double dactyl (actually two of them, so a quadruple dactyl I suppose.) I felt like once Jerry noticed his name qualified, he’d be bound to have a crack at them….

Love,

The Airport.

1. Another theory is that the misunderstanding arose via cor anglé, because it used to have a kink in it. But apparently: nope.  It was the angel thing.

2. I mean, if you haven’t already gathered that I am no expert, for heaven’s sake gather it now.