Music Hall

My house is full of instruments that we don't play for fear of the neighbours, so they sit around the place instead, like oversized ornaments not sure what to do with themselves.

The accordion really belongs to my mother, who whimsically bought it when she was about the same age as I am now. She took lessons and learnt Scottish accordion, but I think I'd like to learn how to play it like they do in France, the way Yann Tiersen plays it. It's easy to play around and compose a sea shanty on it though, but it's impossible to remember it the next day.

I bought the mandolin in a very similar whimsical moment, although it was more like madness – the kind of moment when you don't know what to buy for your boyfriend's birthday when you've only been going out for a little while and you want to do something memorable. It was memorable, I suppose, but neither of us have the first idea of what to do with it. I bought a round-backed one because I had read about round-backed mandolins in 'Captain Corelli's Mandolin' and was taken by the romance of it all.





Tonight I'm going to watch my friend play in a concert of gypsy baroque music. She's borrowing my mother's 1970s hippy circle skirt to wear – it fits right into the slightly Russian gypsy atmosphere in a way that it doesn't fit into my everyday life. I kind of love the pulled threads.

Watching it all will make me want to learn to play one of my instruments again I'm sure, but I'm always worried that learning properly might take the fun out of it. Perhaps I'm just happy to experiment forever and just appreciating the happy surprises that you get when something works.