Dear Diary, I gave up piano, and now I'm learning guitar

Well, folks, it’s been a WEEK.

David fell off a cliff in Neighbours. King Charles has cancer. Taylor Swift won AOTY at the Grammys and announced a new album, which is ostensibly called The Tortured Poets Department, but which might as well be called Joe Alwyn Is A P**k And Now I Will Tell You Why. I got accused of abusing a pair of trousers, and had a conversation with a body lotion.

And, amid all of this excitement/horror, I decided that learning piano wasn’t quite enough pressure for me, and that I wanted to learn guitar, too.

This should technically have been a fairly straightforward undertaking, because I already own a guitar, which was bought for me by my parents and uncle, back when I was thirteen, and at the very height of my ‘When Will I Be Famouse’ phase.

Not me, but close enough…

But 13-year-old me was as lacking in patience as she was in talent. She only wanted to learn guitar if she could do it immediately, and without any effort at all, and, back then, in the days Before Internet, the only way to learn guitar without paying for lessons was from books.

Well, my 13-year-old self was not down with that. Learning guitar by reading a book was difficult, and also quite boring, really. So the guitar spent many long years being used as a very large ornament, basically, and then, when I was pregnant with Max, it made what I assumed would be its final journey — up to the attic, so we could turn the room it was being kept in into a nursery.

But now I wanted it back.

Because now we have apps that claim to teach you things you never previously thought possible, and they make it fun, too. Now I could totally see myself picking up that guitar, and unleashing a talent that no one had suspected I possessed. Least of all me.

First, though, I had to get the guitar out of the attic.

This was more challenging than it sounds (for me), because our attic has a hatch that’s kind of tricky to open, and, well, I’d never really tried to go up there before, always just asking my husband to do it for me, like Anne from The Famous Five, meekly staying behind to make supper while the boys and George went off on another ripping adventure.

But no more. Suddenly it struck me as ridiculous and pathetic that I, a grown-woman, had never been inside her own attic¹. That I rely on a man to go up there for me. I mean, I’m not some kind of Jane Austen heroine here, am I? (Although I bet Lizzy Bennet would’ve been up in that attic before you could ask someone to pass the smelling salts, to be fair…) No, I am a strong, independent woman, I told myself. I can open the loft hatch. I can climb a ladder. I can get that guitar, and I can … well, I probably can’t play it right away, but I can try. And that’s the main thing.

I waited until Terry and Max were out of the house so there was no one around to witness my attempt, then I got out the claw-handed stick thing that’s used to open the hatch, and, lo and behold, it worked!

The Chamber of Secrets was open.

My next mission was to lower the ladder — again using the Claw-Handed Stick Thing.

This was a little bit harder. The ladder was heavier than I’d expected, and it descended in many parts (well, three parts. But still.), which all had to be separated in order for it to reach the ground. Finally, though, it stood there before me, stretching up to the open hatch above. As I placed my foot on the bottom rung, I felt like Jack about to conquer the beanstalk … and I continued feeling like this until about three-quarters of the way up, when the ladder started swinging back and forth like a pendulum: the top attached to the loft, the bottom now essentially free-floating, and me clinging helplessly to it, suddenly very aware that I was alone in an empty house, and probably about to drop from the ceiling, with a heavy ladder, and quite possibly the entire contents of the attic, on top of me.

All of a sudden, I could see the flaw in my plan.

Actually, I could see many flaws; one of them being that, assuming I made it into the attic, what then? Now I’d be in an attic. Where it is dark, and mysterious, and where there are spiders, and other creepy-crawlies, and — according to the internet — occasionally a totally random stranger, who has been secretly living in your loft, and will now kill you when you try to enter ‘his’ space.

Even assuming none of these things were true, though, once IN the attic, I’d have to get back OUT of the attic … only now I’d have a guitar in my hands as I attempted to navigate the pendulum-like ladder.

Yeah.

Not feeling so ‘strong and independent’ now, are you, Amber?

Fortunately for me, Terry and Max chose this moment to return to the house, and I somehow managed to shimmy down from the still-swinging ladder, and went to inform Terry that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened.

“I’m totally going to go up and get the guitar myself,” I told him. “Because I’m a strong, independent woman who gets her own guitars from attics. I just need you to wait at the bottom to stop the ladder swinging, OK?”

“Swinging?” said Terry in surprise. “Why is it swinging?”

So, it turns out it’s not actually supposed to do that. Who knew? Other than everybody?

Well, Terry showed me how to stop the ladder from swinging, and up I went again. This time I made it all the way into the attic, where I switched on the light, and crawled on hands and knees to the very furthest corner, which was — naturally — where the guitar was resting.

I handed the guitar and its stand down to Terry, then returned to ground level, where I began the surprisingly difficult procedure of folding the heavy ladder up, and hoisting it back into the loft space.

“Look!” I said at last. “I’ve done it! I’ve put it away! I got it out AND I put it away!”

And, I mean, I realise this is a very small thing, really. To me, though, it seemed like quite a big thing, and I was really quite proud of myself for having managed it. It felt a bit like the start of a montage scene in a movie where the spoiled female protagonist finally learns to stand on her own two feet, probably changing the world in the process. Today, the loft hatch, tomorrow, who knows?

“You’ve left the light on up there,” said Terry, who was sitting on the bed casually strumming the guitar. “You’ll have to go back up.”

Heaving a heavy sigh, I went through the entire, lengthy process again: getting the ladder out, climbing up it, switching off the light, coming back down, and, finally, putting it all away.

“You’ve left the base of the guitar stand up there,” said Terry.

And then I killed him.

OK, not really. But there was absolutely no way in hell I was going to be going through all that again.

“I’m leaving it,” I said wearily. “I’ve done enough. It will be a free-standing guitar now. It’s fine.”

That’s when we noticed that both the ladder AND the loft hatch were swinging merrily from the ceiling, both of them somehow hanging from one nail each.

This time I did not need Terry to tell me that’s not supposed to happen either. Somehow in my pursuit of independence (and, well, guitars), I had managed to break the loft hatch and the ladder. Somehow, in my bid to save Terry the effort of having to climb into the attic for me, I had given him the job of having to fix two different parts of said attic, both of which had been working perfectly fine until I got my hands on them.

This did not seem like a good time to tell him I was now thinking I’d quite like to get down the electric guitar that’s up there, too.

That, though, has been the story of my week — and honestly, my life so far. Each small task leads to two much larger tasks. Every time I embark upon a new project (Piano, yoga, learning to do the splits…), I think of another, much better project I’d like to embark upon instead. And every time I’m alone in the house, I find a way to break something.

Now, though, things will be different. Because now I have a guitar. I am a person who plays guitar badly. A person who, when asked to introduce herself at parties, will no longer just have to awkwardly mutter that she writes trashy romance novels, but it’s OK, you don’t have to read them, but who will now be able to proudly add, “AND I PLAY GUITAR”.

I’m expecting this to be life-changing. I’m considering starting a You Tube Channel.² And I’m also cursing Taylor Swift for giving me even MORE songs to learn when the new album comes out.

I can’t wait.

1. I had once climbed the ladder and peeped in, but that was under Terry’s supervision, so it doesn’t count.

2. No I’m not.