A notable evening

On Saturday evening I was 'home alone' which is a very unusual occurrence! My good lady wife and my three wonderful offspring were at a concert and I therefore had the run of the fridge and in fact, the whole house, fab! There were many things I should have been doing, (finishing the decorating, writing Christmas cards etc etc etc), but a whole evening off demanded abandoning the 'should' and investigating the 'could!' A small amount of both musing and Whisky later and I hit on the idea of learning to play the piano! I was hopeful that with the aid of a book of simplified carol music (unearthed from the piano stool), google instructions and a bit of practice I would be able to meaningfully play, say, "God rest ye merry gentlemen" by the end of the evening.

I was staggeringly wrong in this assumption!

I vaguely remembered the notes on the treble clef ('Elephants Gallop Better During Funder') but had to look up the bass clef sequence on Google. Initially I set out trying to play with both hands but this was an unmitigated disaster so switched to one hand only. Even this was horrifyingly difficult and I was reduced to maniacally shouting out each note out in turn as I wildly dived for the correct key. After a while though this became quite good fun and I thoroughly enjoyed lurching through the carol trying to make it a little further each time (a kind of musical game of SIMON).

Twas a thoroughly good evening and although I have no idea of how you play the left hand part, let alone use the accelerator and brake pedals, I can now give a faltering (much simplified) one handed rendition of "God rest ye Merry Gentlemen" and "The First Nowell"

The funny thing was though. This morning I elected to go to the 11:00am service and not the 09:15, this turned out to be an enormously wasted opportunity! Apparently the pianist for the 09:15 had phoned in sick and there was no one to play the piano! Gutted, my potential moment of glory and I missed it :-(