- 9

i remember: violins.

when it came to being a musician i sucked, and sadly there are few instruments that involved sucking. i tried to bass, i could barely keep a plodding 4/4l, ask for frills and i was in danger in breaking my fingers.
no chance of a rock star career for me.

when i was with annemarie one of the important lessons i learnt was: parents want the best for their kids (true both of mine told me this time and time again, but i just thought at was parental propaganda).
the other lesson i learnt (and perhaps a subsidiary) of the first lesson is that parents want to live vicariously through their kids.

hence the violin.
no it wasn’t my idea.
annemarie was a scouser (i am guessing she still is) and they think music is in their blood. matching me for having no musical talent it became the task of the kid to become a musician.
hence the violin.

now you have to remember that i was a surrogate guardian to the kid, which meant i didn’t get consulted about stuff, but i was expected to be supportive of what annemarie wanted to do. i entered the kid’s life when he was 4 so i missed his first words (also missed the shitty nappies: yay!) now was a chance to hear his first perfect note.
given the nature of my relationship with annemarie and the kid i need to explain the very special demarcation of tasks that annemarie had developed: i got the shitty tasks.
it soon became apparent that supervising the violin practice was a shitty task, and guess who got to take the nightly practice. yup that would be me. now practice was just 10 minutes, 10 minutes of doing scales and going over what he had learnt in his lesson the week before. 10 minutes. not much time at all. well that is the case if you happen to be an adult, if you are a 9-year old 10 minutes is an eternity.
so we would sit there. i would ask him to practice, he would say no, i would explain that if he didn’t practice it didn’t mean that i would read to him or play with him. i would explain that if he did the 10 minutes that he was supposed to do he would have the rest of the evening to play, to read, to visit friends. i would badger, cajole, hector and harangue. it all fell on deaf ears.
sure he would tease with a few lazy pulls and pushes of the bow across the strings until eventually he had done enough to qualify for 10 minutes. except that it would take anywhere between an hour or two to get done.
i wasn’t adverse to listening to the screeching of his violin (hell i have cds based around looped screechy noises) what i resented was the fact i was having to give up so much time to something that i wasn’t keen on.

but i tried my best. i tried to show the kid that the violin was cool. look at how the violin player of horslips rocks out, check out the violin licks from david cross on king crimson records. tried to amaze him with jean luc ponty’s playing on zappa records. it was all met with a stony silence….
i was encouraging, i was enthusiastic i was the energiser bunny of violin practice, but you have no idea how painful it is to listen to someone scratching their way through “baa baa black sheep” or “twinkle twinkle little star” (both of which are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable if the player has little talent…)

many years after annemarie had booted me out i got a call from her. she wanted to borrow some money from me (it made me all warm inside to feel so needed). it was the kid’s 18th and as part of the reward of loaning her the cash i could meet up with him if i wanted to. i did. i was gratified to discover that i still loved him (i am not ashamed to admit i teared up at the meeting), that i had cursed him with the love of star trek and that he was a guitarist in a rock and roll band.

but i will never forgive him for those hours wasted with the violin.