Discovering a takeaway-ordering rabbit

My ability to almost play the opening bars of Chopin’s Revolutionary Study may seem like a futile skill to have. But I never lost faith that it was going to come in useful one day. I can only play the first bit because I was halfway through learning the piece as a teenager when my piano teacher informed me — compelled, I presume, by some music teacher’s Hippocratic oath — that I would never make a concert pianist, and so I hadn’t the heart to put myself through two hours practice a day any more. I went on playing, but without worrying too much about the precise coordinates of my fingers.

What I lack in precision I make up for in volume, however. It is a very good stress-buster, although not so much for the neighbours. I once knocked on the door of the flat upstairs to complain about an all-night party only to be told by the horrid woman who lived there, ‘I hear you with your rubbish piano-playing.