RIP

Date: 29 April 2008 21:59:58

This is a picture of my piano. Today it joined the Great Orchestra in the Sky. We've needed to get rid of it for a while. I haven't been able to play it for a good few years as it was so out of tune (and tuning would probably have resulted in at least half the strings snapping), and it got bashed about a bit on the move up to Glasgow so the pedal was broken and one of the panels had fallen off. The last time I tried playing it properly it was so out of tune with itself that even though I was playing the right notes I sounded like Les Dawson. I'd been hanging on to it for purely sentimental reasons - my parents bought it when I was 11 so that I could learn a second instrument (I'd already been playing the clarinet a couple of years by then, and they could see that I was really into music and might well go further with it). It only cost a pittance, even then (creakgroanargh years ago), and so by the time it had reached the 21st century was worth nothing. But it was My piano, and there are so many memories I have attached to it. Playing instruments was such an enormous part of me growing up (and of course my first degree too) that I feel like I've said goodbye to a large part of my history. I think my favourite piano story was when I was doing my Grade 6 clarinet exam. I didn't get on with my clarinet teacher, Miss Armstrong, at all, couldn't stand the woman (now, looking back, I think she was probably very nice and also rather sad and lonely, but when you're a stroppy teenager you don't think like that, well I didn't anyway). She invited herself round to give me some extra tuition just before the exam. After the lesson I was desperate to get her out of the house, but she insisted on plonking herself down at the piano and announcing that as she was here we may as well play through the accompanied pieces I was to play as well. I reluctantly agreed, and she struck up her introduction. When I came in it sounded so hideous we both stopped, surprised. So we started again and the same thing happened. This was the first time that I discovered that, although it was in tune with itself, the piano was nowhere near concert pitch and so we just weren't able to continue. I remember having to try really hard not to look smug and pleased about that! Not that I could get rid of her even then - she started looking at my mum's plants, and ended up leaving with an armful of Busy Lizzie cuttings, and I remember (in that stroppy way that only 15 year olds can do) being really annoyed and affronted that she had the cheek to not just disappear. Anyway - my soft spot for the piano really grew at that point! Another funny story (well, funny to me and my mum anyway, though I suspect it loses everything in translation if you weren't there) was when my mum and dad hired a van to bring the piano down to London. It was really quite bulky and heavy, and the van didn't have an automatic lifty thing at the back, so my dad had done a series of detailed technical drawings and plans so that it could be brought out of the van safely (oh, I forgot to mention that it also only ever had wheels at the back, as the two front castors had fallen off even before we had owned it, so that made moving it around even more awkward). He'd also included a home-made skateboard type thingy to make the whole thing go smoother. Nothing much untoward happened, but due to all the bulkiness and awkwardness of the piano my dad, who usually would tell people off if they swore in front of us, was f-ing and blinding like a trooper, whatever my mum and I were doing was always wrong, but we were too busy laughing to care. We must have looked like Laurel and Hardy trying to get the bloody thing off the back of the van. Anyway - so that's the piano. The guy from a second-hand shop up the road came and took it away, and I was ok with that (it's been taking up space that we simply didn't have, and the living room really was getting ever so cluttered), but when I came back in the flat and saw the empty space where it had been, I'm afraid I blubbed. I did say to HD goodness knows what I'll be like if we ever have kids and they leave home - I'd better start bracing myself now.