Living by the sea we get our fair share of fog, and so it has been the last two mornings. When we first moved here in the 1960’s there was a foghorn somewhere nearby who we christened ‘Little Jim’ and we would hear Jim sounding, and it was rather a nice friendly sound in the fog, although some people found it scary. Little Jim makes a fleeting appearance in my as yet unfinished story about Frederico Milan:
If anything the fog was thicker and more impenetrable, as if night was coming
“Darkness at noon,” Frederico said as they stepped out into the dampness. Somewhere far away a foghorn sounded.
“I thought they didn’t have foghorns any more, I thought they were all retired,” Erin buttoned her coat to her neck and pulling her scarf over her head. “There used to be one where we went on holiday as kids, we called it Little Jim.”
“Aren’t they a bit spooky?” Frederico asked
“We always thought Little Jim was friendly, guiding the ships safely past the rocks. Oh my God!”
A man loomed out of the mist. he was dressed in a long black coat buttoned tightly and he had a black cap pulled low over his face
Foghorns prettily obviously are horns that sound when there is fog, usually at sea, although on wide river estuaries too. The use of sound to indicate danger goes back to very early times, when gongs and bells were used to give a similar auditory signal. With modern navigational aids they are mostly decommissioned, which is rather sad really. There is an interesting article with a nice video clip here:
and here is another little vid:
Lois Elsden 
I like fog horns. 🙂
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