Looking After Number One – An Irishman’s Diary about typos

In a recent column about county boundaries, Irish and English, I meant to refer to a British road known as the “A1”, which runs from London to Scotland, via Yorkshire.

I have since been distressed to learn, via an eagle-eyed reader, that the term I actually committed to print was “AI” – a combination of letters that, in the farming community (of which I believe the eagle-eyed reader to be a member) refers to “artificial insemination”.

And by an unfortunate coincidence, it so happened that the sentence in question touched upon the subject of expectant mothers and their children. More particularly, it referred to a rule by which, traditionally, all Yorkshire cricket players had to be born within the county boundaries.

So my mention of stories about cricket-mad Yorkshiremen driving their women “up the AI” to ensure their offspring’s future cricket qualifications may have taken on a sinister note that was in no way intended.

I can only apologise for the appalling vistas – perhaps involving Geoffrey Boycott and a stud farm – that the mistype may have summoned up. The whole incident is now being investigated. A Dr Freud is helping grammar police with their inquiries.

Lower-case

I’ve written before here about that menace to journalism, the rogue lower-case “l” (as in “love”), which has a habit of disappearing from words such as “public”, without the spell-checker noticing, so that editorials end up calling for “higher standards in pubic life”, or worse.

But a further occupational hazard is that the lower-case “l” (again as in “love”) and the upper-case “I” (as in “Idea”) are notoriously indistinguishable. And now, clearly, this 1/I confusion adds yet another layer of danger.  In the Yorkshire incident, I suppose, I could always blame the keyboard. After all, “AI” also stands for “artificial intelligence”. And I’ve often suspected my Apple Mac of getting up to mischief while I had my back turned.

Failing that, it could be claimed that there’s no essential difference between the number 1 and the letter I, anyway. The Romans considered them the same thing.  A good lawyer might even argue persuasively that England’s modern A1 follows part of the old Roman road north, so that maybe it was the numeral “I” I had in mind.

That would be all the more plausible since, as revealed yesterday, I’ve recently started reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. In fact, come to think of it, that’s it. That’s clearly what I meant by “AI”. I hereby withdraw my earlier apology.  Dr Freud, you’re free to go.

Melodious

Changing the subject, although not entirely, I received an interesting email this week on the subjects of classical music and farming. The two don’t mix much, as a rule. But I’m told that they combine, and to very melodious effect, in a young Wicklow man named Fiachra Garvey.

Garvey is a “pianist/farmer”, according to his Twitter bio, a description I can’t remember hearing before. On the piano, he plays the likes of Brahms, Beethoven, and Prokofiev. In farming, he specialises in sheep, Suffolk and Cheviots mainly.

There can’t be much of an overlap between these worlds, except perhaps that, like piano keys, sheep tend to be black and white, and sometimes highly strung.  Even so, Garvey is equally at home on the family farm near Blessington (where they also have horses, hens, suckler cows, and a sheepdog named Rex) as performing in concert halls.

During last year’s lambing season, for example, he went straight from helping his father deliver little bundles of woolly joy in Wicklow to a recital at Dublin’s Google HQ. And in fact, a few years ago, he was heading for a career as a vet, before quitting the course to devote himself to music.

Being judged the best Irish competitor at the 2009 Dublin International Piano Competition launched his playing career, which has since taken him to places such as London (where he’s now based), Geneva, and Venice. Along the way, he graduated with first-class honours from the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

At the risk of being misunderstood again, I would venture to suggest that Fiachra is an A1 musician. And I’d love to report that, when he plays with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in the National Concert Hall on February 18th, the programme will include the Bach cantata, Sheep May Safely Graze. Alas, that isn’t true, unless he does it as an encore. For now at least, he’s listed only to play another very famous piece, Grieg’s Piano Concerto.