While You Were Googling

“Stop.”

I stop.

“What are you picturing?”

I’m picturing getting to the end.

A few years ago, four and a half to be precise, I asked my children’s teacher to give me a piano lesson. I was picturing playing a few carols between glasses of champagne while my adorable babies sang beside me in their festive jumpers. I was (almost) done with doomscrolling on Twitter. I needed a positive idea to invest in. I yearned for a picture postcard that wasn’t ablaze.

But now I’m back where I began, scowling at uncomfortable questions I play the piano to avoid. What do I want? What is my purpose? Am I making love, or am I mowing the lawn?

Simone Weil said study develops our capacity for prayer, by strengthening our faculty of attention. She considered a lack of aptitude its own blessing, gifting us humility, while one day “a light that is in exact proportion to our efforts of attention will flood the soul” for “every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away.” Basically, I’m prepping.

Varvara decides the music is the problem. I agree! She takes it away. Oh, no, I don’t agree at all! I need the physical music. It’s gone. I’m lost. I feel sorry for myself.

She has infinite patience for repetitions that make me squirm in embarrassment. “Ten more times,” she says, crunching happily on an apple, as I stumble on a bar. But a clever question about pedalling a phrase is rejected as too stupid to countenance. It’s strange. I’m walking on the ceiling of my childhood.

Varvara is right. I do know the music. Which only returns us to the question. “What are you picturing?”

“They’re by the water.” I sense my surliness.

“What are they doing?”

“Dunno. Working it out.”

Everything’s excruciating. It’s easier to live life as a pratfall.

There is discipline in melodic freedom that I’m not close to achieving. The notes keep separating. I make it to a lake. And it’s an Italian one. But I admire myself for a second and suddenly slip beneath a bridge canal side in town. The warm hues of a Venetian sunset pale into the pinks of illiterate graffiti. Intervals splay into the clippety cloppeting of police horses on the road above, relieving themselves with a swish of the tail and a soft thud, as they trot down Camden High Street. An abandoned shopping trolley glints in the water. There’s so much to not think about.

The last part is the hardest to play. A memory losing its contours. I don’t know how to slow it down. I don’t know how to keep its shape. I am the digital clock. I am the diminishing ripple.

When I record my efforts it’s a debacle. I can’t capture anything at all. “But I’ve really, really tried!” I wail to Varvara. “So what?” she asks. I keep trying.

I sit in the churchyard with my friend and force him to listen to my trials. “It’s no Chas and Dave,” he shrugs.

I can’t stop laughing. This is true. It’s no Chas and Dave. It’s my best attempt at Debussy. It’s a marker. In six months, the moon will be clearer. For the moment I’m back to Bach.

And in an extraordinary postscript, Simone Weil is right. Attention in one place is always rewarded. I managed to mow the lawn. Myself. It looks lovely, the intervals are perfect, and the grass grows while I admire it.

Clair de Lune aka It’s No Chas and Dave

Thank you to my beautiful friend and teacher Varvara Tarasova, and to her delicious baby for his commentary.