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  • Off topic but his description of a pal who tried to learn the bagpipes is worth the diversion:

    “I knew a young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes,
    and you would be surprised at the amount of opposition he had to
    contend with. Why, not even from the members of his own family did he
    receive what you could call active encouragement. His father was dead
    against the business from the beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly
    on the subject.

    My friend used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had
    to give that plan up, because of his sister. She was somewhat
    religiously inclined, and she said it seemed such an awful thing to
    begin the day like that.

    So he sat up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to
    bed, but that did not do, as it got the house such a bad name. People,
    going home late, would stop outside to listen, and then put it about
    all over the town, the next morning, that a fearful murder had been
    committed at Mr. Jefferson's the night before; and would describe how
    they had heard the victim's shrieks and the brutal oaths and curses of
    the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and the last dying
    gurgle of the corpse.

    So they let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all
    the doors shut; but his more successful passages could generally be
    heard in the sitting-room, in spite of these precautions, and would
    affect his mother almost to tears.

    She said it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed
    by a shark, poor man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea -
    where the connection came in, she could not explain).

    Then they knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the
    garden, about quarter of a mile from the house, and made him take the
    machine down there when he wanted to work it; and sometimes a visitor
    would come to the house who knew nothing of the matter, and they would
    forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and he would go out
    for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot of those
    bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was. If he
    were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere
    average intellect it usually sent mad.”

    ― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

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