We were blessed in July to attend my friend’s daughter’s wedding in the beautiful Shropshire countryside. It was a wonderful weekend and another full-circle moment, as the bride was the flower girl at our wedding almost thirty years ago.
It was a joy and a privilege to witness the start of their married life together.
And I wish them both all the joy in the world.
Still my happy place
I first wanted to play the piano when I was nine, and it still means the world to me that Mum was willing to find the money for lessons, especially as money was tight. To this day, I remember the excitement of returning my completed permission slip, followed by the crushing disappointment of being unable to start because we didn’t have a piano at home.
Without the ability to practise at home, the school ruled that there was no point in my having lessons.
So I swallowed my disappointment, forced it down, and promptly got on with life as a nine-year-old.
What difference might it have made to my life if I had started lessons then? Perhaps none, perhaps everything – I will never know. There might well be a story here, I think 😊.
But then, I guess these things have a way of wriggling free and working their way into the open.
Fast-forward thirty years or so to when my husband asks what I would like for my birthday, and I tell him, ‘A few piano lessons,’ thinking I can give it a go and move on. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that the same rule still applied.
There is no point unless you can practice outside lessons, which is how a slightly battered and beat-up keyboard appeared in our living room on my 45th birthday—assembled while I was at the Co-op.
All it cost was a bottle of red wine and the fuel to collect it.
That was the start.
I did not realise how much I needed and wanted to play the piano until I saw it assembled in my home, and that single moment almost brought me to tears.
Today, I have been playing the piano for over fifteen years, and it continues to be my happy place, despite my apparent lack of progress. I have never really progressed beyond grade-three pieces. But that is not the point. There is something about this fantastic instrument that somehow caught my imagination at a young age, and it’s never left.
And my love for this instrument has only been heightened by Channel 4’s The Piano – we are now in series four, and somehow the producers keep finding ways to make each series better than the last.
I love seeing what playing the piano means to the people who step forward with their stories and their piano playing. I love seeing how some can bring a busy train station to a complete standstill and the transformation of those playing and those listening.
It reminds me of the memorable scene from The Shawshank Redemption – when the main character, Andy Dufresne, uses the prison loudspeaker system to share Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’ with his fellow inmates. And for the few bars of music Andy manages to share, it seems every prisoner is set free.
That’s what I see watching some of the onlookers on The Piano.
The programme sends my soul soaring.
And I am truly grateful that after all these years I can say to that nine-year-old, this is for you, our happy place.
Until next time