Travelling back from my saxophone lesson on Saturday, a very attractive young woman kept looking at me. Did I finally have sax appeal I asked myself. [1] I wasn’t sure whether she was intrigued by my haggard and haunted appearance (see picture below left) having had a particularly intense sax lesson [2] , or whether she was admiring the remorseless precision of my profile (see picture below right) [3].

Notes

1. When I first took up the saxophone, I rented one rather than forking out for something I might not be any good at or like. I went to a private tutor for a while, to learn the basics. Elaine came with me. One day we had this conversation:

   Tutor: Terry, why do you want to learn to play the saxophone?

   Me: So I can be a babe magnet.

   Tutor and Elaine: 🤣😂

   Me: I didn’t think it was that funny. <Sigh>

2. It was utterly brilliant though.

3. Sadly, not my original phrase. It comes from one of Stephen Potter’s Oneupmanship books, in a section called Woomanship, which is for men hoping to attract the attention of a woman. (At this point, if Substack allowed people to put footnotes within footnotes, I’d insert a footnote to say that the section is hilarious, because I cannot imagine any woman falling for the tricks, but Substack doesn’t so I can’t.) It recommends that you decide either to be incredibly handsome, or incredibly ugly. These external states are achieved by a form of self-hypnosis. Potter describes a scene in which one man is standing stock still repeating over and over again the phrase, “The remorseless precision of my profile”, while another is pacing up and down saying over and over again, “I am an outcast from the world of beauty”.