How to become a tortured musician in 10 easy steps

1) Start life in a non-musical, working class family and drop hints about how much you want to play the most expensive and biggest instrument you can think of.

2) Get access to said instrument at the age of 17 only by living as a lodger with another family and have to ask every day when it would be convenient to play.  Then learn by ear because you can't afford lessons and end up playing better than the landlady does, who is having lessons, so that she hates you all the more.

3) Leave and go to university to do subjects totally unrelated to music because you've got no formal music qualifications.

4) Pay for your own piano lessons out of your student loan while using out of tune pianos in student practice rooms whenever you can, especially the one right below the halls of residence official's flat who's such a battle-axe she immediately complains bitterly about the noise.

5) Move back to a small town to do a music course equivalent to two 'A' levels just because they've got better pianos than the same course in London.

6) Work on properly learning to play the piano at the age of 21 by working for less than the minimum wage in a local piano shop and getting a piano for trade price and then practise for four hours a day in an attempt to catch up with all those people who had piano lessons from the age of 5.

7) Compare yourself with virtuoso level pianists and try to play the stuff they play.  Relentlessly berate yourself for not being as good as them even though they started playing at the age of 2 and you only started getting lessons at the age of 19.

8) Keep focussing on your songs and piano skills and playing a real piano not a stupid little keyboard instead of trying to make contacts in the music industry because you don't much like going out to pubs and drinking beer anyway.

9) Hit the height of your skill about 5 years before social media and computers to record on come into play so that you miss out on all the opportunities to record for free and promote your work for free.  Be slow to adapt to new music industry model through lack of funds to get a computer because you spent all your money on piano lessons and moving your piano from place to place.

10) Take music and writing songs so seriously that you can't bear to do it in a half-arsed way or 'just for fun' so you always practise loads before any gig.  Which is rather tragic as each gig costs you £40 in cab fare for transporting your full length keyboard (that someone names an ironing board because of the cheap, rickety stand you've got for it because you couldn't afford a better one) and be forced to give up in the end through sheer poverty and trauma.

[Look out for the next post on 'how to recover from being a tortured musician'!  I'm nothing if not helpful, right?]

Letting go

As I was picking up the inner bits of my cafetière from where they were drying on the washing up draining thing this morning, a glass that one bit had been drying on got stuck and then rapidly unstuck again and broke.  This was one of my favourite glasses originally bought as a pair from a second hand bric-a-brac shop on Pembridge Road in Notting Hill.  I remember buying them and washing them because they were in a bargain bin left on the street outside and they were only a pound or 50p or something like that, but I knew they'd be gorgeous after being washed up.

The loss of this glass today was like an omen.  I'm probably going to have to let go of a lot of things that hold precious stories from my past and discard them to help with moving out.  I still don't know where I'm going to go, but if the worst comes to the worst and I end up having to move in with the cowboy, I know it will mean discarding even more than I otherwise would, which for me is like letting go of my identity.  Books and diaries, scrapbooks and magazines all form a kind of 'family-and-friends' community for me in the absence of geographically close ones of the human kind.  

How I will live with the idea of throwing books into the recycling bin is quite another story.  I used to give them to charity shops in the UK of course, but there aren't any second hand book shops here, except antique ones and those would be books in Czech, of which I have a more limited supply than English ones.

That glass was also a symbol of reward.  A nice little glass of wine in it was like a little acknowledgement that I had worked hard and survived and deserved a soldier's recognition for fighting through the loss and hardship.  Now both that glass, the champagne glass pictured in my profile pic and all the other nice glasses and mugs and things I had to leave behind in London are gone.  Along with my piano, several beautiful photography books and more.  Will I have to get rid of all my diaries and letters from ex-partner and photos from my life too?  Where will I draw the line?  How will I draw the line?

Someone (probably some great leader or guru or someone that I should really know) once said that all pain comes from attachment.  Maybe I have to learn that getting so attached to things is silly.  Or that cherishing things is the root of all evil.  Or something.  I always thought that being attached to things, especially things no-one else would like to steal, but that mean a lot to me, was a better strategy for life than attachment to people.  Because people can up and leave of their own free will and 'there ain't nothin' you can do about it'.  Maybe I got it all wrong.

That glass breaking was like the very beginning of my heart breaking.  It symbolised all that I've lost over the last few years and all that I have yet to be forced to relinquish.  So I burst into tears.  (I hadn't yet had my coffee of course, so that's my excuse.)  Because I'm not entirely sure that this is 'no more than you can handle' as people say about life when it gets tough.  You're not supposed to be sent 'more than you can handle' but I think I'm going to need a helluva lot of help to get through this because the last time I moved I had lots of help.  And then some.  And I bloody well needed it because I had to give up my piano, my country, my relationship and my work all at once.  Not to mention a good few friends too.

This time it feels like giving up the last thing I had going for me: my privacy.  My space in which to do all the things I need to do to keep me going: aerobics, writing without distractions, listening to music, peace and quiet when I need it, being able to sleep in my own bed, having a bath with a chair piled with books and magazines next to me, doing singing practice and even recording.  These are my strategies for survival when there's no money or when there's no-one out there who gives a damn or when hope seems to be beyond the reaches of the planet's atmosphere.  Are there any flats available on a planet in Andromeda by any chance?  I mean, San Francisco would be wonderful, but beggars can't be choosers...

Another List

Things I wish I had or could do RIGHT NOW:

1) To not have to go to work in less than half an hour.

2) To not have to wait an hour and a half between finishing one meeting and conducting another, culminating in a long day so I don't get to finish early on a Friday.

3) Go on a shopping spree for summer dresses, delicious-smelling toiletries and creamy, shiny make-up and silly, frivolous accessories like hoop earrings and butterfly necklaces. 

4) To not have to think of the 'usefulness' of everything I read with an eye on good vocabulary for meetings.

5) A glass of some kind of exotic fruit juice mix with a straw and a colourful cocktail umbrella thing on it.

6) More energy.

7) Time to waste painting my toenails or something suitably superficial like that.

8) A Magnum ice cream.

9) A piano.

That's it.

Trips, toil and traffic jams

I found out that the Czech expression for 'traffic jam' involves the use of the word 'constipation'.  So Czechs say ,,dopravní zácpa" [transport constipation].  How delightful.

I went on a rather marvellous little trip at the weekend, to a ruined castle of sorts.  The kind of small-scale place I used to have pointless fantasies about owning one day.  I would of course have to put a piano in it.  I figured it would look good in this 'room' with the view to die for out of the windows, as well as a view in on where the piano should be:

The view:

I went with the architect of course, knowing that next weekend, all semblance of normal life would have changed, due to a visitor.  In the meantime, I have unfortunately been caught up in a skewed, work-filled time-space continuum whereby no matter how much extra work I do instead of sleep, I still have about three more hours of work to do than I think when I start again the next day. 

Hence the absence over the last few days.  Still, I might actually get to wander around Prague and remind myself I'm here and not in some factory workhouse, riding the conveyor belt of tedium and toil, for once, now that I have to show someone else around the place.