I haven’t blogged for a while and one of the reasons is the tangle of thoughts all spinning around in my head. Too complex and large for a tweet and yet substantial enough (is that a tautology?)  for a blog post? I’m not sure.

The people who know me best are those who read my blog, not necessarily avidly but those who at least dip into it from time to time, so I’ve decided that the journal category would be an adequate repository for these swirling thoughts and vignettes. 

Last year we treated ourselves to a rather swish digital piano to replace the one we’d had for decades. (Why is it always the B flat that goes sticky?) I say “we” but it’s actually  nearly always John who plays the piano, despite my unwavering ambition to get back into it after, ooh, almost 40 years. That my ceasing to play the piano occurred at the same time as the entrance of John into my life is no coincidence. I, who had to pick painfully through my prescribed pieces note by note, was in awe of someone who could play by ear. I remain tongue tied in the presence of musicians. I do play, occasionally, but it’s usually a more transactional interface when I’m trying to pick out notes for the latest choir part to learn, for example. One day.

Anyway you’ll be aware that Oscar, our flattie, is a dog of Musical Bent. He loves to sing. He’s loved to sing with the trumpets and the clarinet and the sax, and I find myself going upstairs to my bedroom to practise my own singing, so that I can actually hear myself, because he’s not keen on following me up there. It’s naughty.

Now, Oscar appears suddenly to have taken against the piano, so much so that the first chord from John is enough to make him tap the garden door to be let out. A couple of weeks ago he spent the whole evening doing this, fleeing the kitchen of this open plan, multilevel house on his creaky paws at least half a dozen times in the course of one evening. It’s literally Pavlovian.

At first, reluctant to cast any aspersions over John’s musicianship, we wondered whether it was was a quest for attention, a sort of pass/agg “You never want me around when you’re at the piano” thing.

A couple of days later I was at the piano running over one of the runs in the B Minor Mass which I was trying to speed-learn at the time. Oscar bashed at the kitchen door. Now, we know that our dog likes Bach, so we  realised that it wasn’t John’s playing or his musical taste. The following night, as John opened the piano cover Oscar, who was lying at my feet by the sofa, struggled up onto his stiff paws, glanced nervously over at the piano and, without a single key struck, hurried off downstairs to the kitchen. 

I have no idea why Oscar has suddenly developed this aversion to the piano. Is it grumpy old age or something to do with the sound frequency? If anyone can suggest any explanation – especially flattie friends – I’d like to hear it.