Little Blue Trumpet (EN)

I never used to grasp how people who spoke a different language actually understood each other. So strange! Why did they communicatie so complicated, with such a funny accent. You know what I also thought? That in their minds they really ‘think’ in Dutch. They must do. A sort of built-in google translate. I too wanted to speak such a secret language. To a certain degree, I succeeded. But once you start to speak a foreign language, you soon forget what it’s like not to. And you no longer find it quite so remarkable to converse in that previously strange tongue.

When someone else is good at something, regardless of what it is, I think that is remarkable. HOW do they do that? I genuinely admire their ability. For you know all too well that no one gets handed a little pile of ‘cleverness’ at birth. Nobody becomes a professional painter, pastry chef, translator, teacher or mother overnight. Not without first falling incredibly hard, and then bravely getting back
up. That’s why most of us would never choose to swap another’s success or disappointment for our own. Because you wouldn’t fancy that painstaking process of falling down and picking yourself back up again. Irrespective of what comes next.

If you’re good at something yourself though, you tend to think it unremarkable. You forget those preceding 20,000 hours spent copywriting, or those 400 sermons, 6,000 baby bottles, 10,000 folded pairs of socks, 5000 nights of singing your heart out in small-time venues until you were able to perform in front of royalty, or those 100,000 children’s jabs you gave before qualifying as a doctor of tropical diseases. Even those 100 'immedressies' could only ever have been written thanks to what you did before, no matter how quickly they emerged.

Enter the Little Blue Trumpet.

For all that I've been able to, can or will achieve, I’ve bought a trumpet. A mini-trumpet in a mini-suitcase. I painted that trumpet in my favourite colour blue and hung her carefully up to dry. Now she’s ready for her debut. Why a Little Blue Trumpet? Or indeed a trumpet? Because it evokes that beautiful Anglo-Saxon expression, to blow your own trumpet – to be happy with what you have been able to, can or will achieve. That’s precisely what the Little Blue Trumpet is for. For when you make others happy, cause them to smile, move them, or simply get them thinking. And vice versa.

The Little Blue Trumpet passed my word test with flying colours: the sound is good, the letters match in terms of form and order, and it rolls nicely off the tongue - Little Blue Trumpet. I only noticed the similarity in sound order with immejurkie as I started to write.

The Little Blue Trumpet - I know where she came from. Now I’m merely waiting for the surprises her toot will surely herald. In her own inimitable, trumpetuppy little way. As we know her.