Tuesday, December the 7th, 2004

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Meldrum Fonseca : Über-trombonist

Eschewing the nose-flute, Meldrum Fonseca first took up the trombone at the age of seventy. Before this, his entire musical experience was limited to singing in the bath—or possibly singing in Bath, it is not quite clear. Having spent the best part of his life as a plinth magnate, Meldrum was a rich man. From Aleppo to Zug, few cities or towns exist without at least one plinth from the Fonseca Plinth Factory or one of its many franchised workshops dotted haphazardly around the globe.

The conversation on that autumn day, under an overcast sky, went something like this. Meldrum's paramour, Mrs Fonseca, asked him why he had never learned to play the trombone. This was a common verbal sally of hers, keeping Meldrum alert by firing questions at him which he had never been asked before. On the same day, for example, she asked him if he knew the slightest thing about the skeletal structure of badgers, and whether he could recommend a particular recording of a 19th century railway timetable being read aloud from cover to cover.

Due to Mrs Fonseca's constant mental prodding, Meldrum's brain was a superb mechanism, thoroughly exercised, almost like a champion greyhound. Although often his answers to these constant questions might simply be “yes” or “no”, his response to the trombone enquiry was “Well stap my chives, Marjorie-Suzanna, that's a bloody good idea! I'm going to go out this very minute and buy myself a trombone!”

And he did. He engaged a tutor on the same day, an unnerving milksop called Reynolds. Reynolds taught him daily for the next year, at which point Meldrum had become so adept that the tutor threw his hands in the air and said, in his weedy little voice, “Mr Fonseca, I can teach you no more! Your skills have outstripped my own!”

From that day on, Meldrum spent most of his time standing next to a hedge by the ring road, playing his trombone and gladdening the hearts of all who passed him by.

Source : Little Stories Of Charming People To Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart by Dobson (out of print)