Saturday 9 October 2021

The Mystery of Not Eric Idle's Signature

 On a street in London, between Highbury and Highgate, I recently found a piece of A4 photo-quality paper with what I took to be the signature of the writer, actor and Python Eric Idle.




Given that I have, in the last few years, seen one Python in Hampstead, another one in Highgate, and that there are blue plaques in Highgate pubs to two more, it didn't seem unlikely that a fifth might have been in the area, and signed a piece of paper for someone who subsequently lost it. I thought there was a reasonable chance of restoring it to its owner via Twitter, and was about to try, when I looked up Eric Idle's signature. It looks like this. 



Not even close. So... what I have in fact is a piece of expensive paper on which someone has scrawled the name of a comedian I admire, and then dropped. On a street I often walk down. On a Zoom call recently, I witnessed a friend's small boy bustling in to say: "Dada, I'm making a trap. It's not for anybody. I need your notebook." Had a similar fiendish mastermind set a trap for me? Well, probably not, because on closer inspection, I'm not even sure it does say 'Eric Idle'. The second word is surely Idle, but the first? 



That's not Eric, is it. "Eirc", at best. Or maybe 'Eire'? And there's a full stop after it, so maybe it's a contraction. 'Enc.'? For a moment I thought I'd cracked it when I remembered that engines can idle. But I can't think of a situation where you'd need to scrawl a note to someone telling them that an engine was idling. And anyway, there's no way that last letter's a G. 

So, I thought maybe someone here might know. What does it mean?