A small, sticky patch of dark matter

One of the reception children is exceptionally musical. "Tell her mother," I say to her form teacher. "She really ought to be encouraged."

I get home to find Peter the piano teacher waiting on the doorstep. Peter, who has come to mend the broken piano pedals, is a huge improvement on his predecessors.

Andre was dark, intense and almost as monotonous as one of his own tuning forks, so dull that any wine glasses not already shattered by his voice would hurl themselves to the ground, opting for suicide rather than endure any more of his monotonous exposition of his marriage problems. He would pause only to make a half-hearted pass, which was easily fended off with a ukulele I kept specifically for the purpose.

Affected by his sombre mood, the piano would soon have dropped down a semi-tone into a dark, flattened depressive state which made me want to give it a sharp kick in the hammer felts and tell it to pull itself together.

After Andre came Ian, who was blind and driven everywhere by his amenuensis wife. In their spare time, the couple planned Frankenstein dog breeding projects, mixing and matching Cruft's Originals. They'd just staked everything on an exciting new model when the puppies contracted a brand new and 100% fatal disease and they lost the lot.

Before Peter, there was Giles, a short, wheezy man with all the charm and personality overload of a radiator key. Even his interest in pianos seemed faintly unhealthy, turning his favourite phrase, 'tickling the ivories,' into something with positively pornographic overtones.

But Peter brings no baggage or seedy demeanour with him, just new piano pedals.
"I got them at the piano pedal shop," he explains, when I ask. That clears up one retail mystery, then.

We're getting on fine until I apologise for the distinctly crumby nature of the carpet, which hasn't been visited by a vacuum cleaner for so long that it's all but posted 'Wanted' posters round the house.

"Oh, don't worry about that," says Peter. "You should see my house."

"Should I?" I say.

"Oh, yes. Why, the decorator I got in said there were so many patches of dirt that the paint just wouldn't adhere properly."

He takes my expression - combined horror and fascination - as an invitation to continue.

"It's not everyday dirt, apparently, but the patches of sticky dirt. Old jam, honey or - "

"I think I've got the hang of it," I say, hastily.

I've just waved him off the premises - avoiding shaking hands - when the teacher rings. "I told Mrs Brown that you'd said her daughter's a really strong singer and all she asked was whether you're that madwoman who teaches the recorder."

If there still is a dark force somewhere in the vicinity of that piano, I'm going to give it a map and a name and send it on its way to the Brown household. That assumes, of course, that it hasn't got trapped by a stray patch of sticky dirt imported by Peter the piano tuner.