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GETTYEd Balls passed his Grade Four piano exam
Not for your economic policies but for passing Grade Four on the piano.
Though I can’t imagine how you manage to practise every day when you’re thinking about the mansion tax 24/7.
After a late session at the House do you still come home, throw off your overcoat, shoot your cuffs and manage an arpeggio or two?
I’m madly curious about this because like the shadow chancellor I too am a late-comer to the keyboard.
After a lifetime of vaguely wishing I could play Moon River or The Entertainer and wow all my friends I decided to do something about it.
A secondhand Yamaha keyboard acquired in September was the best investment ever.
It came with headphones enabling me to stumble through a cheesy rendition of Strangers In The Night at 3am without fear of waking anyone.
At the touch of a button this wonderful instrument can sound like an organ, a harpsichord, a string section, a vibraphone or an electric piano.
I can play the idiot’s version of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy very loudly and make myself almost weep with the beauty of Ralph McTell’s Streets Of London.
Weep! It probably doesn’t have the same effect on others but then Wigmore Hall isn’t in my sights yet.
Nobody has to listen. I’m very old to be doing this but who cares?
I have recently found a piano teacher who is half my age and sees me once a fortnight.
This keeps me on my toes and ensures I practise.
“Concentrate,” he says sternly, when I begin to flag.
It’s hard, hard work but the fabulous feeling when you play something and it sounds right makes it all worth it.
In an interview Ed Balls says he doesn’t think about the deficit when he is playing the piano and neither do I.
You can’t think about anything else but your clumsy fingers.
It stretches your brain in all sorts of new directions and that has to be good. Ed’s ambition – apart from the political one – is to pass Grade Eight by 2018 when he turns 50. If he does it would be a considerable achievement.
So now I find myself terribly torn. I’d promised myself that playing the piano would be pure relaxation, that I wouldn’t even think about taking exams, that I had nothing to prove to myself or to anyone else.
But I’ve got Grade Four envy now, Ed envy, a little flickering flame of competitiveness.
It looks as though passing (at least) Grade One has to my New Year’s Resolution.
Does the urge to pass exams never go away?
What is it to be – simple pleasure or that all-important piece of paper from The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music?
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The endless saga about Top Gear’s troubles in Argentina drags on like a bad cough and is the focus of tonight’s Christmas special.
It’s all very well setting himself up as the bad boy of the BBC but Clarkson seems to have lost his cool over this one.
His Porsche had the number plate H982 FKL. Locals regarded it as a taunting reference to the 1982 Falklands conflict and things got ugly.
Clarkson insists the number plate was a coincidence.
It was a stunt that turned serious, alarming to those involved but – sorry – not to the rest of us. Just stick to the funny stuff Jeremy.
You got out with your teeth in your head so stop going on about it now.
Come to think about it there are lots of other things I don’t want to hear about again in 2015 – among them the Clooneys, the Elgin Marbles, selfies, Russell Brand, Cara Delevingne, Kim Kardashian’s backside, Lord Rennard, Ched Evans and Plebgate for starters.
I live in hope.
Happy New Year.
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Poppy Jamie?
No, I’d never heard of her until the other day but she’s a 23-year-old showbiz presenter who pops up when you’re flicking aimlessly through Freeview.
She was interviewing Ben Kingsley because he’s doing the publicity rounds for the new Night At The Museum film.
Poppy’s harmlessly ditsy manner clearly grated with the great Sir Ben.
But as he was supposed to be promoting a children’s film what did he expect? No need to have been so sneery surely?
It reminded me of my first ever interview. It was with Jacques Tati.
The great comic genius was an austere man who spoke next to no English and didn’t respond well to schoolgirl French.
The thought of it still makes me break into a cold sweat. This was also the week when the great TV inquisitor John Freeman died, aged 99.
His sombre TV interviews broadcast between 1959-1962 (he was the one who reduced radio personality Gilbert Harding to tears) were made in an age when an interview was supposed to be the opportunity for a serious conversation.
But now the celebrity and the PR machine – not the interviewer – are in the driving seat.
You are often told what subjects you must not raise and you may not be trusted to be alone with the interviewee in case you go off message.
Stars are usually contractually obliged to “do” publicity and while many – such as Sir Ben – clearly regard it as beneath their dignity, they should also be contractually obliged to do it with a good grace.
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Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has never been troubled by self-doubt and the statue of him erected (I can’t think of any other word for some reason) in Madeira’s capital of Funchal will confirm him in his magnificent opinion on himself.
But honestly one really doesn’t know where to look.
What an enormous… er… plinth.
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There seemed a certain logic to the idea that the secret of a happy relationship was to live apart but history tells us otherwise.
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow lived on opposite sides of Central Park but they still ended up hating each other.
Now Tim Burton and Helen Bonham Carter, who also had separate houses, have announced that it’s over.
At least they don’t have to divide their books and kitchen utensils – just, sadly, their children.
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Good old South West Trains. Their cheery Christmas message was a thinly disguised warning to their wayward passengers to “treat our staff respectfully”.
Or else.
As you can imagine this warms the hearts of meek, downtrodden commuters beginning their day in the dark and means absolutely nothing to the drunken buffoons and troublemakers at which it is aimed.
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In Downton you can bet good money that when a weary-looking woman in a cloche hat arrives hand-in-hand with a small boy at some toffs’ get-together the pair may as well have “spurned mistress plus love child” tattooed on their heads.
And so it proved to be in this year’s Christmas special which saw stuffy Lord Sinderby almost outed as the adulterer.
He’s plain old Lord Sin from now on.
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It was 70 years ago this month (the 15th) that band leader Glenn Miller’s aircraft disappeared over the Channel.
A documentary on Radio Two presented by chuckling Len “Strictly” Goodman told the familiar but compelling story and delved into the weirder theories surrounding his presumed death.
And then of course there was the irresistible music, “the creamy saxophone sound with the clarinet over the top”.
You can hear the radio doc on the play-it-again-Sam facility (or whatever it’s called) but Channel 5 is also showing the 1954 James Stewart film The Glenn Miller Story on New Year’s Day.
Lovely.
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On Boxing Day the Today programme scraped the barrel – and then some – by letting John Bercow edit the show and bore on about his plans for a digital democracy.
Estonia was his role model (it was that dull) where because you can vote electronically you are free to change your mind and have another go.
“You can vote as many times as you like,” said someone happily.
Hmm, sounds a bit dodgy to me but I’m sure Speaker Bercow knows best.
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No Prince George?
The Royal Family’s latest superstar didn’t attend church on Christmas Day to the disappointment of many.
But those who remember the days when their own children were tiny will also remember how enjoyable it was occasionally to step out in to the world unencumbered by wipes, tissues, snacks, a bottle of juice and a spare nappy and without having to stop every 10 yards so that said small person can examine a stone or a twig.
Obviously Kate has every child-rearing luxury that money can buy but even so it’s always good to have a break.
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