and another

When I first encountered Doug I discovered that he played guitar and occasionally trumpet though presumably to a far better standard than I with my self-teaching-by-ear of guitar and paltry year of once-a-fortnight cornet lessons for the skill part of my DoE. It later turned out that he originally played the French horn in a youth orchestra and only played trumpet on the side as it suited his band's music better. It later still turned out that he can also play trombone. Shortly after he and his wife moved into this house they acquired a piano which he can also apparently play. Luckily his wife decided long ago not to teach him the violin on the grounds that he knows quite enough instruments already.

Surprisingly, whilst he was demonstrating the pieces they've kindly offered to play at our wedding his matching children scampered off and returned shortly with button-festooned microship-filled plastic toy guitars; I'd have thought that such musiciany parents would spurn such tuneless-electronic-noise-making things in favour of glockenspielen, xylophones and other such real-but-still-suitable-for-children instruments; they may well have been gifts from well-meaning but misguided otherpeople and they'll probably be learning proper instruments soon enough by the alacrity with which they stopped slamming into walls on their push-along car things and gathered round the piano when it started up even if they did try to play it with their elbows.

One of my many school-based regrets is not taking as many free music lessons as possible in the time available considering they were free and got you off other lessons. A trumpet or cornet is on The List of Things to Get when we Move into a Bigger Place before I entirely forget how to play it; even with a mute it would be a deeply antisocial thing to take up in our current tinyflat both in terms of the other resident and our few neighbours so I'll have to wait awhile. I was never particularly good at it but had at least been taught to play it properly and could thus read music for it; as I learned guitar the bad way it would be a pain in the arse to go back and learn properly though there's much more internet around these days than there was back then which would probably be of some help.