Putting the sick in music

The rest of the family regards my piano practice like knitting; something I do with my hands to while away idle moments until something more interesting comes along.

They treat it with the indifference it so obviously deserves. I think they feel quite sorry for me - a poor, bored, ageing woman, sitting there striking random notes and hoping against hope that somebody will take her mind off things with an interesting problem to solve.

Fortunately for me, with all these dreary hours to kill, they're always happy to oblige. The first few notes act every time as a call to arms: within a few minutes of striking up the first notes I can guarantee that there'll be somebody leaning standing right next to me or, if particularly urgent, on the keys, talking to me at length and as loudly as is necessary to drown out that dull old music.

It's begun to dawn on me that this could be the reason I'm still a terrible pianist - but I am a first rate multi-tasker. I've set Beth's algebra problems to 'Shine Jesus Shine,' paired Francis' extensive ruminations on the possible causes of the new bathroom leak with arpeggios, and accompanied Deborah's many lectures about exactly which aspects of my parenting she most despises (it ranges from most to all) with a series of two octave scales in sixths.

In fact, I'm so used thinking of playing the piano as a kind of background activity to any other task that I've begun to feel it's missing on dog walks and during meal preparation.

So you'd have thought that I'd welcome the arrival at school of Sasha, the new music-mad assistant head, with open arms. She's new, she's fizzing with energy and she wants to know all about us and, in particular me. And, more particularly still, absolutely everything about the recorder, because if there's one thing she loves, it's music-making with this age group, she tells me, delightedly, referring, I assume, to the under 8s rather than the over 35s.

She favours oatmeal cardigans and a big smile, as forced as early rhubarb.

"I can see you've got a great sense of humour," she says, when we first meet. "We're going to be a great team."

'Team' in the context of anything other than a now defunct chocolate wafer snack is a word to strike terror into my heart. Teams are for horses or relay runners, not for women fighting their corner against the dark forces of bureacracy, government and clothes shops that sell jackets so small that the only part of me they would comfortably enclose is my drink-swollen liver, making colour matching horribly difficult.

The next day, as I am about to get started on the first recorder lesson of the new term, Sasha appears, cradling a normal recorder and what appears to be its two ugly sisters. It's been pantomime season in recorder land.

"I am feeling ENTHUSED," she says. It's fair to say that she is alone in this, especially when I learn that she has re-scheduled her all her departmental meetings so she can be involved in all future recorder classes.

She speaks wistfully of her old school, where the music teacher used to 'fill the school with beauty', singing as she went. Instead they have me, filling the school with the sounds of muttered blasphemy and lost chords. "How do you want to do this?" she asks me. "On my own," I'd like to say, but don't.

I have never made a secret of my lack of previous teaching experience, which is just as well as Sasha quizzes me so relentlessly that I am thinking of getting highlights from my CV tattooed on my face. There are also moments when the minimal role played by The Arts in my life so far is so dazzlingly obvious you could stick it in the sky and use it to land night flights at Heathrow.

I put music stands together, and end up with something that looks like a minimalist Christmas tree crossed with a miniature version of 'The Angel of the North' complete with my own finger tips by way of decoration. Sasha demonstrates the recorder to the class, years of expertise apparent in every note she plays. Then I take over. "You don't use your left hand for those notes," she hisses.

Sasha’s enthusiasm extends to forming a staff recorder group. Her recruitment drive begins at break, when she attempts to infect the other teachers with her relentless energy.

"Can you read music?" she asks one of the teaching assistants, who is carefully tracing and cutting out 50 paper leaves, a painstaking task which requires total concentration and a large pair of scissors. “No,” replies the assistant, snipping carefully round a stalk. “Would you like to learn?” “No,” she says, again. The scissors tremble slightly in her hand. “What about joining a recorder group?” “I just want to sit here quietly, minding my own business and doing my leaves,” she says,in a voice of just perceptibly rising hysteria. She adds the finished leaf to the pile and starts on the next. “You’re in!” says Sasha.

By the end of break, Sasha has also recruited the caretaker, who arrives at the end of her stirring recruitment speech - "With just five notes there's any amount of fabulous 16th century music you can play," - and is so moved he volunteers on the spot. The following day I ask her how membership is progressing. There is a pause. "I'm making other plans," she says, grandly.