I remember distinctly the day my mum finally let me stop taking piano lessons. I was perhaps seven or eight, and it was one of the greatest days of my childhood.

Then, there was my French Horn period that we don’t much like to speak about. Late with my enrolment to the Beginner Band in year 7, the saxophone cupboard had been cleaned out by the cool kids who were already blasting almost recognisably Kenny G riffs on the backseat of the bus. Thus, I could choose one of those wooden instruments with a reed in it, for which I might as well have just wedgied myself, or the French Horn which I had never heard of, but at least it was the same colour as a saxophone.

I thought maybe people, from a distance, might have taken it for a saxophone variant, or at least saxophone adjacent, so I shrugged and took that squiggly looking thing home with me.

But alas, one toot on that weird little mouthpiece thingy that detaches for no obvious reason, and it was clear nobody was ever going to mistake me for a saxophonist. For those who have never encountered a French Horn, it is a decidedly ungainly looking thing; and spit gathers in one of its little tubes that needs to be drained from time to time via a little lever. Gross.

I am 100% sure nobody has ever been woo’d by a French Horn.

But I was pretty good with those three little buttons on top, and my teacher was excited that there was somebody on the Eastern Seaboard under 50 learning French Horn so she invited me to a French Horn gathering at her house, and her friends were there and they ate liquor chocolates and played French Horn at each other and then she encouraged me to ‘play at the academy’ or something of that nature, which my mum then told everybody about, which was either not what the teacher said, or if she did say it not really a very cool prospect, so shortly after that I quit.

Anyway, the point of these half stories is that despite the evidence available to me, I still think the one thing I want to be able to do really well in life is play a musical instrument. So recently, as a much older gent, I have started taking guitar lessons.

And when you try to take up a musical instrument in your mid-forties there aren’t too many people in your ‘circle’ doing likewise. “Hey Harry, I hear you started learning the Timpani recently, would you mind flicking me the detes of your teacher? strong arm emoji shrug emoji drum emoji”

No, the only people learning instruments are your friends’ children, and thereby the only teachers available are the ones who make their (cash in hand) money teaching six year olds.

Slight digression here because a repressed memory has just pounced out of my subconscious where it should have remained in its semi-hibernated state. When I was a teenager I couldn’t swim because I grew up in a cold place and I don’t really have the skin tone for the beach or the public pool anyway. My mum, accurately, saw this as a serious developmental issue so enrolled me in swim school but ticked ‘beginner’. Again, accurate. So, on the day of my first lesson I went to the local (indoor) pool where I was joined by a group of proper beginners, and their prams and their mothers. I stayed for three more lessons and honestly, I was so much better than those toddlers by the end, and my mum barely even had to come into the pool with me.

So I’ve had about four guitar lessons so far and the cognitive load is unbelievable. My teacher is a nice fellow, a little bohemian, and very good at guitar. He gives me little compliments which are mostly based on the fact that my hands a bigger than somebody in grade 2; “wow, you were able to form that chord structure so much faster than most of my students!”, but then we start plucking away on one of Beatles songs, and he is strumming the chords, and I am clumsily picking away the melody and he forgets that I am terrible at guitar, and gets quite fancy and then I lose it completely and stop and there is a great sense of deflation in his little studio.

But then we start again, and actually I get a tiny bit better and I can really feel my aged synapses resisting what is going on. They are so happy in the shape they have settled into over the decades; all of the real estate is allocated, the boundaries are settled and there really is no requirement to forge new highways, or backstreets or anything. But they must, and they do! And I can feel Simpsons quotes slipping out of my brain, because there are no greenfield sites left, and all the seemingly unnecessary versions of the F chord take their place.

This week my teacher made me a cup of tea before class, and we talked a little bit about politics and the world, and at the end of class he said to me “I am glad to have you as my student, it is much better than the drudgery of teaching primary school kids”. I thanked him for the nice compliment and thought back to those happy days in the pool.

I am still better at stuff than a six year old.