One distressing example of this is the combining of two words that should not be combined because the combination already exists and has a different meaning or different usage from the one intended. A rather inelegant sentence, but a couple of examples will serve to clarify my meaning.

“Everyday” is an adjective meaning “commonplace”, “ordinary”, “usual”; for example “Being hit over the head with a baseball bat is not an everyday experience”.  “Every day” is an adverbial phrase meaning “on each day without exception”; for example “He washed his socks every day“.  Of course, the first of these examples could be expressed differently: “It’s not every day that one is hit over the head with a baseball bat”; the second, however, could not.  “He washed his socks everyday” is just plain wrong.

Or rather should be wrong.  Unfortunately this drip-by-drip erosion of correct usage is probably unstoppable.  Another example is the use of “forever” when what is meant is “for ever”.  The first means “time and again”, “repeatedly”; the second means “for all time, continuing into the future without end”.  I’m forever complaining about the misuse of language, but it’s unlikely that I will be doing so for ever.

This piece has been written rather hurriedly, owing to (not “due to”) a minor illness in the household, and perhaps my examples have not been chosen judiciously enough; be that as it may, these are real assaults on our language and should be resisted by all who love her.

In this context, hats are a particular dislike of mine.  At this time of year I frequently wear a hat to conserve my body heat.  I’m very fond of my current model, a dark brown fedora which accentuates my resemblance to Terry Pratchett.  In summer I favour a wide-brimmed straw hat which I bought in Bude many years ago and which is now in a sad state of disrepair, or a floppy “Country Gentleman’s” hat from Arizona.

However, there is a widespread belief that any band playing jazz in the style of the 1920s or ’30s is improperly dressed unless sporting straw boaters, a belief which is so strongly held by some booking agents that they stipulate in their contracts that such hats must be worn.  On one occasion I rebelled against this ridiculous condition on the grounds that a straw hat in combination with a cream dinner jacket and black tie could not be worn by any person with a shred of good taste – not even a drummer.

It’s often hard to see any logic behind the insertion of unnecessary apostrophes. Some people are apparently uneasy about the plurals of words ending in a vowel (other than ‘e’), for example “cameras”, “zebras”, “pianos” and of course “tomatoes”.

One can sympathize with this to some extent, because such plurals sometimes look odd and there’s often some doubt about whether to insert an ‘e’ before the ’s’; but there’s a very simple rule concerning apostrophes: PLURALS NEVER HAVE AN APOSTROPHE (unless of course you’re talking about something that belongs to the plural object in question, like “the pianos’ keyboards” meaning the keyboards of more than one piano).

With a rule as simple as that, how do so many people get it wrong? Is it some form of mild dyslexia that affects a large percentage of the population? In my mailbox this morning I received a newsletter from the booking manager of a swing band which contained the following: “The gigs in both Los Angeles & Washington DC had a highest ever attendance, with over 850 dancers braving the sub-zero temperature’s … “.

What on earth possessed him to put in that rogue apostrophe? “Temperature” is just a normal word; it’s not an abbreviation, it’s not foreign, it doesn’t end in an ‘a’ or an ‘o’ – how can anyone with a claim to being even moderately literate write “temperature’s”? If he were my booking manager I’d sack him.

A note from the Department Of Stating The Bleedin’ Obvious (aka the West Oxfordshire District Council): Among things you CANNOT put in your recycling box is “Anything too large to fit in the box.”

In my 68 years I’ve seen and heard many changes in the way English is written and spoken. Not all of them are bad. A living language must and does change. However, some of the changes are – in my grumpy old-fogeyish view – regrettable, to say the least.

In this blog (note that I eagerly embrace neologisms such as ‘blog’, a new word to describe a new concept) I shall mostly be charting what I see as the decline of the language, as evidenced by its misuse in newspapers, television, radio and the Web. (Note also that I say ‘radio’, not ‘wireless’ – I’m not that much of an old fogey.)

I don’t quite know where this blog will take me; how it will develop and mutate. I know that the tide of change, most of it for the worse, can’t be stemmed or turned back; but at least I can raise a still small voice of protest amid the prevailing cacophony.

The blog’s title, by the way, is from a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson: “Bright is the ring of words, when the right man rings them.”

The first of my three gigs this year came into that category. It took place near the end of January in the idyllic setting of Coleton Fishacre House, a National Trust property near Kingswear, Devon, built in 1926 for Rupert D’Oyly Carte.

The band was a trio – trumpet, piano and string bass – plus singer Judy Eames. The bass player was a veteran of vast and varied experience with whom Jude and I had worked once before; the pianist was a young man we hadn’t met until that morning. Fortunately we had time for about an hour’s rehearsal before the gig.

We played in the music room, with its Bluthner piano which had of course been tuned the day before, to an audience of between 50 and 60 people, the maximum that the room would hold.

The programme was chosen to be in keeping with the style of the house – late 1920s – which meant that the young pianist knew hardly any of the material; but this didn’t matter in the least – we just provided him with chord charts from which he constructed brilliant interpretations that sounded as though he’d been playing them for years.

As for the bass player, he was paid the ultimate tribute by Jude when she chose to sing 16 bars of one number with only the bass accompanying her – not many singers would risk doing that, and even fewer bass players would be capable of carrying it off.

The session went with barely a hitch – there were one or two moments when things threatened to become unravelled, but they never quite did – and we were rewarded with loud and prolonged applause. The real reward, though, was the knowledge that with the minimum of rehearsal we’d managed to combine our talents and hard-won experience to produce a unique musical creation – the best that we were capable of. The only regret is that it wasn’t recorded – but then the best things never are.

There are, of course, many thousands of well-written, interesting, thought-provoking blogs out there. If you’ve yet to dip your toe into the blogocean, have a look at the Technorati site (see link top left). It’s amazing and rather terrifying to be confronted by this tsunami of cyberspatial verbosity. Why do people do it? Why am I doing it? Vanity, I suppose, at bottom.

Well of course in my case it’s not vanity. No, no. I started doing it, as I said in my first blog, just to find out how it was done so that I could pass the knowledge on to my daughter-in-law, Janice Day. I found that I quite liked seeing my thoughts on the screen, even though I suspected that no-one else was seeing them, and continued to blog sporadically.

I see that up to now I’ve only ever published five postings – a pretty miserable record – but perhaps this time it will be different. I have more time on my hands (there I go again!), the steady stream of gigs that I used to experience having slowed to a mere trickle. The diminuendo in quantity, however, is balanced by a crescendo in quality. I’ve had only three gigs so far this year, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every one of them. Look out for my next blog to find out why.

So we played background, but not wallpaper, music. Applause was muted as it always is when the audience is eating, but it was an appreciative crowd in which, because of the nature of the occasion, at least three generations were mingled. At the end of the session we exchanged cards with a gentleman who worked for the BBC and who said he would pass on our details to a certain producer. I doubt whether anything will come of it.

We have had our moments of radio glory, including appearances on Charlie Chester’s Sunday afternoon programme, but – like dear old Charlie – those days are gone. The BBC pays lip-service to jazz, but gives little exposure to musicians like us, who have spent their lives trying to perfect their art in pubs and working mens’ clubs and holiday camps and hotel restaurants and supermarket car parks, and who sometimes manage to create – let’s not have any false modesty here – exquisite little masterpieces in miniature which almost always ‘lose their sweetness on the desert air’. But remember, you who read these words (if anyone ever does) that whatever frustrations and hardships we may endure can be wiped away in an instant by one kind word from you. Just ‘Brilliant’ will do.

This follows a gig I did three weeks ago at a pub in Bristol where the audience was mostly young people, presumably students. What’s more, they were really listening, some of them standing close to the band, obviously *feeling* the music and showing their appreciation by their enthusiastic applause. It was like going back in time about 45 years.

It has to be said that such events are rare, at least in my experience, but it shows that the potential for appreciation of our music by people in their teens and early twenties is there, given the right combination of circumstances. I took part in a school workshop recently where I had the wonderful experience of hearing a young trumpet player – a competent reader – begin to improvise as he played without written music for the first time.

Some idiot said to me once – about 45 years ago, as it happens – “Jazz is dead, innit – rock ‘n’ roll’s like taken over.” It wasn’t true then, and it’s not true now. The future is bright! Per ardua ad astra!

The gardens were exquisitely landscaped, with streams and ponds all over the place. We were invited to help ourselves to beer (which miraculously didn’t run out) and the buffet was unbelievably wonderful. All in all a pretty good gig.

Two other events made this gig memorable: in the last set, between 8 and 9 pm, we had to compete with the sound of bell-ringing practice from the church across the road; and in addition to our cash fee the members of the quartet were each presented with a bag of sausages.