Comfydown Cottage

Address Withheld

Carryduff

Belfast

Dear Mr Lyttelton

My wife Gloria (I’m her husband) and I are enormous jazz fans and particularly enjoy Louis Armstrong. But I desperately need your help to settle an argument we are having. We were sitting listening to some of his tunes the other night whilst having a cup of beef tea and Gloria asked me did I know that he was not only a superb musician but was also the legendary BigFoot.

What? I asked her. Yes, she said he is known as Sasquatch apparently and he got a kick out of doing this in his spare time. Gloria had heard that apparently Nina Simone told him once that he had big feet and that gave him the idea. He went to a friend who worked at the props department at MGM and got an old ape outfit left over from a B movie some years previously. But she is insistent that his feet were that size and not some prosthetic appendage.

She is also insistent that Louis in fact staged the famous film footage of BigFoot walking in the forest. He got a friend with an 8mm camera to travel up to the forest with him and then film it. There is also supposed to be another version about with ‘BigFoot’ paying the trumpet dancing, doing handstands and running up to the camera and saying ‘oh yeah’ like at the end of Wonderful World, but this has rarely been seen. He is also supposed to have invented the whole Indian legend stuff too. Apparently the Indian community just went along with it as it was good for tourism.

I have tried to tell Gloria that he was actually called Satchmo but she just insists that that is just an old Indian word for Sasquatch, so you can see my problem. As an authority on Mr Armstrong can you possibly clear this up for me as living with her at the moment will be intolerable until this is sorted?

So, to allow us to return to relative normality could you please tell her she’s barking mad?

Yours sincerely

John J Marley

HUMPHREY LYTTELTON REPLY