One of my most precious possessions is my piano. There are a few reasons for this. It has come to me from my mother who in turn took possession of it from her grandmother. My mother learnt to play on it, as did I and both my brothers, and now my three children are also learning to play it. It is not the best piano in the world, it has a very heavy touch, is hard to play softly (in fact we all just play the loud bits extra loud to compensate) and it squats in my dining room in all its early 20th century ugliness as the very worst dust collector in my house.

But it has been my constant companion for nearly all my life. My mother played nursery rhymes to me on it, as I did for my kids. We sing carols round it at Christmas. I play duets on it with my children. I accompany them on their string instruments. I feel privileged to own it.

I am not a naturally talented pianist. I had to work extremely hard to reach the dizzy heights of a scraped Grade 6  before leaving home. I cannot pick out a tune by ear. I find modern, contemporary music almost impossible to play. My hands cannot span an octave comfortably. But still I gain immense pleasure from being able to sit down at it and thump out a reasonable rendition of something by Beethoven.

As a child I worked hard at it, mainly because I was that sort of child, but as I got older it then opened doors for me that I could never have forseen. I was asked to play double bass because I was a pianist with no other instrument. That led to orchestral playing both at school and in the County system. I was asked to play in bands for school productions and got to be a percussionist (one of my fondest memories from middle school was learning to play timpani).

And  importantly it taught me to read music. And that has been one of the most useful and enduring skills I learnt as a child (and there are many others I did not gain in a class room, sewing, baking, basic DIY to name a few). It now means I can help my kids with their music making. I can sight read music in the choir I now attend regularly. I could, if I wanted, pick up another instrument quite easily.

But more than that my music making taught me self discipline, team working, that nothing comes without hours and hours of work. It allowed me to experience the terror of exams, the highs of performance, it helped me to learn to overcome my nerves. It gave me a confidence that, as a shy child, I lacked in other areas.  I was never going to be picked for sports teams, star in the school show or be top of the class this, then, was my ‘thing’.

And so I am a passionate believer in music in the school curriculum. In every school having a thriving choir. For every child who wants to to have access to instrument lessons as cheaply as possible. I am nervous of politicians who label music as an ‘extra’ which should only be offered ‘after the basics are secure’. I believe that is fundamentally wrong.

Some of the high points of my childhood remain my participation in music making, in providing enjoyment to an audience, however partisan, in playing amazing classical music in fabulous acoustics. In my current life singing with my choir provides the same high. As does banging out a Chopin Nocturne on my ailing piano.

Footnote
This post has become even more poignant for me as I found out yesterday that my piano teacher of 7 years from age eleven to eighteen died last week. He was a lovely man who was unfailingly supportive and even got me (the shyest child in the world) singing and playing in public in his fledgling youth theatre enterprise.
RIP Andy

I have been following Bear Grylls, The Island recently. Brief synopsis: he drops 14 men and separately 14 women off on remote Pacific islands with 3 machetes, 3 knifes, 8 fishing hooks, a bow for fire lighting, 2 days survival training; and watches them starve. Essentially.

It makes for interesting if somewhat lively viewing. Bear interjects at various intervals outlining the perils they are in, repeating himself often but looking fetching in his rugged, Chief Scout way.

Apart from being amazed and appalled at the amount of rubbish the islands collect (which actually forms the basis of the survival of these people) it also makes plain major differences between the sexes. The hackneyed stuff we all know about. Women would rather befriend piglets than kill them. Men fight for dominance. Women cry (although conditions are such that the men are not immune to this). Men are obsessed with bowel movements. Women hug and support each other (mostly). Men are galvanised by the thrill of the hunt.

I have always been keen on men (steady on) and have many male friends. I can relate to them, I have brothers, I am not interested in traditionally girly pursuits. In fact other than a very few, very old girl friends I have the most female friends currently than I have ever had. And that is because I am a mother- the role that actually binds women together more than any other.

But that doesn’t mean I understand men. Or can get into their heads. Oh no most of that is still a mystery.

I have now lived with one man for nearly 15 years. Mostly we rub along fine. I am sure that he finds a lot of what I do and say  intensely irritating. The feeling is mutual. I guess marriage is like that. My current girl friends and I discuss our menfolk regularly. Here are just some incomprehensible male ‘things’ we struggle to, well, comprehend…

• Putting the glass on the counter above the dishwasher is actually almost as much work as placing it in the dishwasher upside down
• When opening a new 100m roll of Clingfilm that will last about a year it is better not to ruin the box. Thereby not allowing easy perforation of the film going forwards. For a year. Nearly always by the partner who didn’t break the box.
• The suggestion on a Friday night of ‘doing something’ at the weekend means a trip out to a National Trust property or a local walk, not an overnight stay on a camp site in the Peaks. (see packing below)
• If you need to spend 30 minutes on the toilet you need to see a GP
• When the kids are calmed down for bed it is not a good idea to instigate a Nerf gun battle/ sword fight/ tickle torture session.
• After packing ALL day for a holiday/ night away at a campsite in the Peaks the comment ‘have you packed xxxx’ is not appreciated.
• The inability to find things. Ever.
• Cooking is feeding a family day in day out to high nutritional standards, and involves planning, shopping and boring hours of chopping and stirring for no reward. What you do is  ‘chefing’. And no you don’t deserve special praise for it.
• Looking after your own children is not babysitting.
• No one over 20 looks good in lycra on a bike. Just accept that. Sundays are full of men of a certain age rekindling their youth in lycra (which probably wasn’t invented then) and getting in my way on the roads.
• Please finish the old tomatoes before you start the new ones (see ‘finding things’ above).
• Please check the stores before buying food items (see ‘chefing’ above).

I could go on but this is now turning into a serious rant. And although I have called this blog musingsponderingsandrants there must be a line somewhere. I am determined not to cross it so early.

My husband and I enjoy The Island. We shout at the screen. We believe we could do better. I know this is not true. In my case I would faint after about 3 days from low blood sugar. And my husband would loose his glasses rendering him entirely useless.

Soon we are moving house. In fact it is a matter of weeks away, barring legal or financial disasters.

It is something we have been meaning to do for a while but the right property never showed up. This is mostly my fault.  In fact I vaguely remember agreeing to move house when the discussions for child number three got underway. I have to say I reneged on that deal rather shamelessly once she was a reality claiming that uprooting us whilst I was in nesting mode was not a great idea.

Since we had number three, and especially as the kids have got older, the impracticalities of our current house have not escaped me. I have not been blind to the bathroom queues, the insufficient ratio of toilets to clamouring bowels, the lack of spare room for visitors and my inability to escape from ancient episodes of Top Gear (currently numbering 23 on my TV’s hard drive).

But getting myself to an emotional point where I am ready to move out of this place has taken me a long time. I have had to play a lot of trundle bed Jenga before reaching the point where the impracticalities over rode sentiment.

And the simple reason is that I love this house. It surprised me to calculate that I have lived at my current address longer than anywhere else in my entire life (12 years). But length of occupation is only part of the story.

When hubby and I were looking to move here from West Yorkshire we endured a hideous few months of long distance house hunting, spending every precious weekend driving down and trying to view houses, most of which had gone before we arrived. In the days before Rightmove and in a seller’s market our task was made very difficult. We viewed this house almost by accident on our way home after another demoralising weekend of fruitless searching.

And I walked through the door and fell in love.

That love has only grown and matured over the years as this stack of bricks has witnessed pivotal moments in my life and that of our family’s. Two of my children were born within its walls, and all that history and laughter seem to reside in its actual bones.

We have slowly dragged it into the 21st century, lavished money and time on it. We got rid of the lime green wood chip which used to actually glow. We have made height measurements of the kids on our under stairs cupboard door. We respected its idiosynchronicities, fitted Billy, fed workmen tea and biscuits, encouraged bird life, felled conifers, won over neighbours and made it ours.

I have never walked through the front door in any situation and not felt relief, peace and harmony. It is at its best in sun when light streams through the enormous 1960s windows and cheers my soul. Since my kids arrived I have spent a lot of time in it and watched life pass my front window. Since they all left for school I enjoy the peace of it alone for many hours a day and it feels like my friend.

It is only a house. I am moving around the corner, and I mean literally the corner. I like the new house and it will no doubt serve us much, much better.

But I will miss this place. More than words can say.

So today youngest asked me to time her running around some obstacle course she had devised in one of our local haunts. Being the troglodyte that I am, and forgetting that my phone has a timer, I turned to my (analogue) watch to use the second hand. Bizarrely and presumably due to some battery issue (I am not so technologically challenged that I need to wind my watch) the second hand was jumping round in four second intervals.

This not only prompted me to find the aforementioned mobile phone timer but also made me think about the nature of time itself.

It’s a well known phenomenon that time appears to accelerate as we get older. Certainly as I sit here on a beautiful mid to late April evening it is hard to remember where January and it’s subsequent friends went.

But, and here is the rub, our holiday last October in Florida seems a whole lifetime ago and yet when my piano tuner recently called to book his six monthly appointment I could swear he was only here last week. You see? Elastic…

We can all remember the long empty summers of our childhood’s. Day after day of hot sun, taking honey sandwiches up to the bypass embankment (that is probably just me and my brother) and playing in the street until dusk. The next school year apparently an eon away with each yawning day waiting to be filled with adventures, some reluctantly undertaken chores and quite a lot of boredom.

So why now do the kids’ school holidays appear to rush by in a whirlwind?

When I was first at home with my eldest as a baby time seemed to creep by. I remember hours of walking round my village with just my thoughts and a really fairly unresponsive son for company. I remember on one such walk calculating the number of days I would need to fill before he started school (that Maths thing again). And I used to impatiently watch the clock tick round to the home coming of my husband, and the chance for someone to talk to.

Yet now I look at that same son, strapping at 11, and wonder where all that time went.

WordPress has decided to post this prematurely (technology, pah) and so my time is up. I need to edit this quickly before anyone finds it incomplete.

And I guess it is an apt metaphor. Life is busy, full of pressures and deadlines and so time slips away. Sometimes the boredom and slowness of those earlier periods seems like the halcyon days. Life is a rollercoaster you can’t get off with all too few slow trundles up hill.

Its hard to take the time to appreciate it all as the world whips by… in four second intervals…

As some of you reading this first, and slightly tremulous blog entry, may know, if only from bitter experience of reading my many many Facebook entries, I like to write.

Not always well, not always grammatically correctly but nevertheless I like to write.

It is strange really because at school I was a ‘scientist’ and therefore not known for my writing. I was defined by my maths skills, by my more than slightly geeky membership of the almost all boy geek club that was Further Maths, by my love of playing bridge in break times. I dropped all ‘art’ subjects like hot cakes and set off down the route to smelly lab coats and Bunsen burners as soon as feasibly possible.

My mum despaired of me when my reading matter of choice leant towards Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, both fine writers, but not on my mother’s list of ‘proper authors’. I never really got on with Dickens or Shakespeare or the like and sat fairly clueless in English Lit lessons.

However I have always had a secret literary side. Involving penning my own words. These will never make the ‘proper author’ shelf but the process has always given me pleasure.

Don’t get me wrong. My back catalogue is not extensive but I often find myself thinking ‘I must write that down’. And secreted away in various places around the house are evidence of my efforts. A set of hand written poems I wrote when I was about 10, mostly about moving house and my new baby brother. Scrawled diaries in my teenage years which now make painful reading. Another set of poems, this time word processed, in my bedside drawer penned around the early 90s during that melancholy period at the end of my University career. And a whole set of tongue in cheek articles I wrote for the local NCT magazine when my children were babies and toddlers.

Recently Facebook has been my main outlet. And often I think that maybe it is not the right place for some of what I want to say. Or even that my posts are too long or not of interest to everyone.

So I have toyed with a blog for a while. And today appears to be the day. Quite why I am not sure.

Setting it up was remarkably easy. Writing this felt natural, although it is probably very dull!  Keeping it going may be more difficult. I am not really after an audience as such just another, more modern outlet.  Let’s see how it pans out….

PS I am a massive fan of the ellipses (the name of which I only learnt from my children)… As Facebook friends will know… I am trying to limit usage… It’s not going that well…