Mind Your Language | 23 April 2005

‘He has just had a lunch of eels and is in good spirits,’ wrote Mr Alistair McKay of Mr George Melly, in the Scotsman. ‘If he finds it tiresome to talk about himself, he does a fine job of disguising it. But the stories are worth waiting for and the louche music of his voice is compelling. He talks somewhat like a man blowing smoke rings from a rusty trumpet.’

It was the word louche that worries Mr Cecil Gysin from Farnham. He fears that writers do not appreciate its true meaning. ‘The Shorter Oxford gives us “oblique, not straightforward” and directs us to the French, where I find “squinting, dubious, ambiguous, equivocal, suspicious, shady”.’ Certainly one or more of those meanings might suit Mr Melly, and others not. He might have defied conventional morality, but that is no reason to judge him a bad man, or even a ‘suspicious’ one.