Never felt more like singin' the Blues

Vincent and the boys enjoy the win

Three days down the line and I’m still singin’ the Blues – the Blues in question being Manchester City, who triumphed in the League Cup final (or the Capital One Cup Final if you insist on the sponsored version) at Wembley on Sunday afternoon.

Yes, I know that it was ‘only’ Sunderland (which is massively unfair on them), but it was a match taken seriously by both teams and by both sets of fans and which, for those reasons alone, brought prestige back to a competition that, in recent years, has suffered because some clubs have treated it as a sideshow to the main events of the title and the FA Cup.

We last won it in 1976 – 2-1 against another North East team, Newcastle, with goals from Peter Barnes and a memorable overhead kick from Denis Tueart: I still have the press cuttings in a scrapbook.

That was a victory that marked the end of the good times, though, followed as it was by a silverware drought that lasted until the FA Cup final of 2011.

With last season’s FA Cup final defeat by Wigan all too fresh in the memory, the Black Cats’ goal on 10 minutes did nothing to soothe nerves.

It’s a good thing that I have short hair because otherwise I’d have been tearing it out for an hour.

‘No, no, no – not again! Please no!’

I arrived in good time and took my time wandering up Wembley Way, sampling the atmosphere. No silly jester hat this time – it was probably why we lost in May.

Superstition plays a role on such days: coffee in my ‘City ’til I die’ match day mug first thing in the morning is an established ritual.

Up in the gods to watch the gods

This time, with yet more rain promised and greyness already evident, I attired myself in navy cords, a hooded sweatshirt and a home shirt (Zabaleta on the back). This is not a particularly fetching look for anyone of my shape, but since I was determined to wear colours and since I’d already tried the shirt underneath a hooded sweatshirt look for the Barcelona game (which we lost) I wasn’t repeating that mistake.

Then for the City dog tags, the earring and the two rings – one of which, a 1970s enamel crest on a stainless steel band – was given to me as a Christmas present by friends at Fairfield High School for Girls, which just happens to be up the road from where the current stadium is.

That one has enormous sentimental value – I refused an offer of a tenner for it some years ago, when a tenner would have been very welcome – and only comes out for the really, really big games.

A baseball cap (Champions’ League) topped off the ensemble – as I said, no wearing that blue and white jester hat again – together with a Capital One Cup Final scarf that I’d picked up at the Etihad a couple of weeks ago, since it was cheaper than anything that the stalls on Wembley Way could offer.

The atmosphere was brilliant – none of the pessimism and doubt that City fans were feeling last May even before we made it into the stadium.

The only real question on people’s lips was whether Manuel Pellegrini was right to opt for Costel Pantilimon in goal rather than Joe Hart – a slightly odd thing to be asking when Roberto Mancini’s dropping of Pants on the morning of the Cup Final (and then sending one of the junior coaching staff to tell him) had almost certainly been one factor in what happened that day.

If you’re going to operate a squad – and with so many matches in so many competitions in a single season, you have to – then you don’t drop players when they’ve got you to a final.

Anyway, once inside the stadium, a pint of Tetleys was slowly imbibed while gazing outside.

At one point, a Virgin Pendolino sped past in the near distance, on its way north. It reminded me of all those trips I’d made in that direction, glancing to the right as we passed Wembley and uttering a silent prayer that I’d eventually get a chance to see City play there in a final for a proper trophy.

Mike Doyle with the League Cup in 1976

And here I was, on a third visit to the stadium in four years – the second for an actual final.

But however much this is a new incarnation of the Blues, the history remains.

In the fourth minute, in honour of former skipper Mike Doyle, who lifted that last League Cup in ’76, fans stood to applaud the man who died in 2011.

And nicely done by Wembley for putting up a picture of him on the big screens too.

Then, at the end, as I was leaving, people were taking it in turns to ring a very special bell outside.

Helen ‘The Bell’ Turner was a lifelong City fan who sold flowers outside Manchester Royal Infirmary, raised loads of money for charity, and carried a school bell with her to all games, where she rang it with a vengeance.

She stood behind the goal and would chat with ’keeper Joe Corrigan, giving him a sprig of heather before each match.

She was so much a part of the club that she ‘rang out’ the final game at Maine Road and, when she died in 2005, there was a minute’s silence for her.

And back on that League Cup Final day in 1976, memorable pictures attest to her joining the team on their lap of honour with the trophy.

Mike and Helen – just two indicators of how City has ‘no history’, according to some who resent our recent change in fortunes.

Anyway, back to the present – or the rather more recent past, as it is now.

Sunderland’s goal – well taken by Fabio Borini – came six minutes after that tribute, and I spent the following 60 minutes in hair-tearing mode, screaming at the team (and occasionally the ref) and frequently with palms pressed to brow in anguish.

Asa Hartford and Helen the Bell with the trophy in '76

Logic stated that, unlike last season’s FA Cup Final, the opposition had scored early and time was on our side, but logic and emotion are not necessarily the best of bedfellows.

Everything changed, though, inside two second-half minutes.

The Engineer claims not to have said much more at half time than ‘stay calm and patient’, but his charges came out a different team.

And 10 minutes into the second stanza, up stepped Yaya Touré to curl home a miracle shot (at my end of the pitch) from all of 30 yards out.

Then, just a minute later, Samir Nasri gave us the lead with another spectacular strike.

Not, of course, that it was ever going to be comfortable.

Moments of looking fragile at the back were only finally put to bed when Jesús Navas made it 3-1 on 90 minutes.

What a friend we have in Jesús.

Especially on a Sunday.

Now the celebrations could really begin.

Oh, the joy of seeing Vincent Kompany lift a pot at Wembley!

Most of the Sunderland fans stayed for the presentation and afterwards, as we were all slowly trooping out of the stadium, we applauded them and they applauded us.

They’re fantastic fans and helped create a really marvellous atmosphere: a credit to their club and their city.

Not that you’d have got that impression the night before from Tory MP Robert Halfon, who tweeted in disgust that they’d ‘taken over’ Covent Garden and turned it into a “cesspit”.

How dare those dreadful northern oiks come down to the Big Smoke to wreck your night out, eh Bobby?

The public-school educated politician has since apologised for calling Sunderland fans “scumbags”. He, however, remains a plonker.

I joined friends for a spot of post-match partying – although, in ridiculously middle-aged style, I was still home by 9.30pm.

It had been another day of sharp emotions: of dramatic highs and crazy lows.

But goodness: after all the years where what we mostly worried about was whether we could avoid relegation – and goodness, I shed a tear or two in those times – and where, more than once, we rescued defeat from the jaws of victory, how wonderful to be there, at Wembley, to see the Blues lift a serious trophy once again.

And on Wednesday night, I’m pleased to report that my voice has recovered.

Well ... almost.

Memories of several Bottoms

Sheridan Smith, David Walliams and fairies

On Friday evening, I trotted along to London’s West End down to see David Walliams’s Bottom.

Yes, yes – I know. I know it’s been done before, but apart from one tweet, not by me. So I’m afraid that you, dear readers, have to put up with it being done here.

The fourth production in the inaugural season of the Michael Grandage Company sees A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing to packed houses in the West End – and the main reason for all the bottoms on seats is less that it’s the Bard and more the star casting.

Walliams has been cast as Bottom, while Sheridan Smith takes on the traditional dual roles of Titania and Hippolyta.

The former brings the pulling power of Little Britain to the production, and has been directed to camp up the part for all he’s worth.

Smith brings with her the success of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, plus stints on the Royle Family and Jonathan Creek, and has been directed in such a way that you wouldn’t know about that televisual CV unless you recognised her name or checked out the programme.

My own first Dream was way back in September 1976 at the Bolton Octagon, when a seat in the gallery cost just 50p – the ticket is still pasted into an old scrapbook.

It had been our introduction to Shakespeare a year earlier at school (when I’d read Bottom in class) and this was the first live production of a play by the Bard that I’d seen.

Then in April 1979, it was the Fairfield High School for Girls annual production (tickets 60p – there’s inflation for you), with me donning something like a sackcloth costume as Peter Quince; a performance that the local paper described as being “acted with authority”.

Actually, what I remember most was being able to say “bloody” twice in a speech – in front of the headmistress.

It was the one performance my maternal grandmother ever saw me in, and she and my mother decided that I had a likeness to one of my mother’s brothers. I’m not sure I’ve recovered yet.

But back to that Octagon production. Wilfred Harrison, who was also joint director, played Bottom. The notes in that scrapbook only mention his performance, but although this is an ensemble piece, the Mechanicals are what grabs the attention of most audiences, precisely because of the timeless comedy.

In 1991, for instance, Roy Hudd’s Bottom is just about the only thing I remember of a production at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – apart from the less-than-brilliant weather.

When it's not raining, it’s a play that is superbly suited to outside staging.

In 1987, the Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster staged its first promenade production in the city’s Williamson Park, around and including the Ashton Memorial as a backdrop.

Andy Serkis as Lysander in Lancaster. Puck to the left

That Dream, with a cast that included, as Lysander, Andy Serkis – now best known as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films – was utterly magical.

Of the ones I’ve seen, it remains my favourite production. The lovers were strongly done even if the Mechanicals didn’t make a major impression in the memory bank: Puck was the stand-out, although unfortunately I can’t remember the name of the actor who played him in full faun get up.

But back to the here and now, and Michael Grandage’s new production.

It’s played at F1 pace – just two hours for the whole play to unwind – and that has some benefits and some pitfalls.

Some of the languorous sense of the poetry is lost by charging at it like this – I was mightily relieved when Puck’s closing speech was allowed its necessary time – but it also works well in particular places, not least in the chaotic row between the four lovers in the forest as Oberon and Puck looks on.

Indeed, what Grandage and his company have done is remove any reverential attitude and emphasised the play’s physical comedy – the majority of which is quite clearly there in the text.

And they also haven’t ducked the point that it’s largely not about lurve, but sex – certainly in terms of Titania and Bottom.

Elizabethan audiences would have known, for instance, that an ass had a large penis, so Bottom’s transformation into just such an animal, combined with Titania’s awakening under the spell, is quite clearly about lust.*

Just imagine what would happen if all those bored schoolchildren being introduced to Shakespeare via this play were told that it was about sex?

Anyway, this is very good fun.

And more than that, it was thoroughly enjoyed by an audience that included a great many people who clearly don’t go to the theatre often – and most certainly not for Shakespeare.

The production has had some brief moments of song and dance inserted – and some snippets of pop classics – and where used, they work.

Gavin Fowler as Puck

While the mechanicals are camper than the proverbial row of tents, the fairies are a group of crusty hippies with a bit of edge.

And the lovers are far less insipid and boring than they can be.

Of the cast, Smith was excellent – all husky voice and powerful allure.

Walliams gets to nick the show – there’s more ham on display than in a Spanish deli, and anyone older than a teen will wonder if they’re seeing the reincarnation of Frankie Howerd at one point in particular – but again, in the context of this kind of production, it works.

Of the rest of a good ensemble, special mentions for Gavin Fowler as Puck – he moves superbly – Katherine Kingsley as a fabulously feisty Helena and Pádraic Delaney as Oberon/Theseus.

Christopher Oram’s sets work well, as do his costumes. In particular, I liked Puck’s trousers, which tallied with the attire of the rest of the fairies, but, in the side fringe, just hinted at a faun’s furry legs.

It’s a thoroughly enjoyable romp – more Carry On than delicate rom-com – but it’s about time that the Dream got this sort of shake-it-up treatment to rescue it from any perception of it being fey, rather infantile and ‘safe’.

Finally, just to note that we considered ourselves lucky in finding – and being able to get a table without booking – Piazza, an Italian restaurant that almost backs onto the theatre.

An independent amid the mass of chains in the vicinity, it did a very pleasant pomodoro (according to The Other Half) and a very nice diavola pizza for me – excellent, doughy base, with fresh tomato sauce, spiced minced beef, red onions, pepperoni, mozzarella and green jalapeños to get the endorphins flowing.

Really not pricy for London, with very pleasant service. That’s one to remember.

* For which insight I thank Jill Betjeman of Lancaster.

Gary Owen put his arm around my shoulder

Gary Owen and me. Maine Road, 1979

I used to love this time of year – I mean, I don’t hate it now, but I used to really love it: perhaps more than any other. The end of August and the start of September brought with it the start of the football season and the start of the school.

Add to that that harvest was always my favourite time in the religious calendar (closet pagan that I obviously was).

But in terms of the new term, that was not because I was some sort of dreadful swot – I wasn’t – but in essence, because by the end of six weeks, I was simply lonely.

Mossley was wonderful in many, many ways, but when we moved there, fellow pupils at my new primary school had already had four years to establish friendships - many of which would already have been formed before they even started school - and when I went to Fairfield, I was the only one from that same primary school, it was two bus rides away and I lived nowhere near nobody anyone in my class.

And in footballing terms, for many years, close seasons were also a quiet time.

Manchester City, so often a laughing stock during a season, were rarely worth much gossip outside of it.

It has been part of the strange new world of winning football’s lottery that we’re now rarely out of the media, whether it’s genuine news about the club, speculation masquerading as news or just gossip.

The last of which brings to mind a very northern vision of gossip - and one that, in theory, I'm far too young to have: Norman Evans doing 'over the garden wall'.

Okay, so Les Dawson didn't invent it, but Evans, a comic right from the music hall tradition, should be way beyond my own memories. He is - but like many who grew up with parents who had lived through the war, the cultural memories were handed down just as much as the stories of, in my immediate family's case, the bombing of Liverpool and Plymouth.

I could mimic Evans before I eventually saw footage of him.

Mine, I think, was a generation caught between worlds: that of the pre-war, in which my parents grew up, and then the sixties and seventies, in which we grew up. A muddled collision of two very different worlds, split by such a short time historically, yet changed out of all recognition by the events that took place within that timeframe.

I offer a single, but very different cultural illustration.

City even invaded my art studies. Niall Quinn

Take Hollywood. Take The Maltese Falcon from 1941. And then take The Big Sleep from 1946. Just five years divide them, yet one remains modern and the other seems dated. They seems to be worlds apart.

My parents, like many others, I'm sure, struggled with these changes – certainly with the moral/ethical ones.

In many ways, I've long felt that I was brought up in a sort of time bubble: it was often really rather 1930s.

My father used to quite openly declare that he wanted a son, but that as a tomboy, I was the next best thing.

When it came to football, I discovered and adopted it all on my own and in spite of my earliest memories of the game, where my father was screaming at the TV set while England were playing (particularly against West Germany).

Rather perversely, although he had – and still essentially has – a very conservative attitude toward women, he seemed to welcome my interest, and bought me football cards and comics, albeit drawing the line at actually taking me to any matches.

My mother, herself every bit as much a traditionalist in terms of what a woman’s role should be – and arguably more so – remains a cricket and Rugby League fan. But somehow football was beyond that – not least as I tried to play at every possible opportunity.

For some years, I was only allowed to go and watch Mossley AFC – the realisation dawned years later that my father had his personal Stasi on duty wherever I went (or parishioners, as they’re sometimes known) and besides, Seal Park was only just behind our house.

In those lonely summer holidays, I’d spend hours bashing a ball against the garage door, lost in a world where I was scoring the winning goal in the FA Cup Final, until my distracted mother would come out and tell me to stop making such a noise.

Mind, come Wimbledon, I’d thrash a tennis ball against a wall and imagine victory in south London.

I was, in other words, sportily inclined, and also somewhat competitive.

For all the attempts to bring me up as a delicate and refined example of the female species, my genes seemed to scream something rather different.

Eventually, in 1979, I was permitted to go to A Real Match.

My parents had taken me to cricket at the real Old Trafford – I have seen Gary Sobers play – but much as I liked and still do like cricket, it made no odds to my blossoming love of the round-ball game, and I had continued to nag.

The Real Match in question was a rearranged fixture at the end of the 1979 season. In other words, it was one of the last opportunities for me to go to Maine Road before we were due to move away from the area.

In retrospect, I rather think this impending move featured in parental calculations.

Since it was rearranged, it took place in midweek. I went with Dorothy Edwards, whose own parents allowed her to go on a regular basis. My envy knew no bounds.

We got there early. My school tie was slightly pulled down – the very limits of rebellious behaviour for me at the time – and I had my school bag slung around me. The photographs make me look far younger (to my middle-aged eyes) than the 16 and a half that I actually was.

With Kaziu Deyna at Maine Road, 1979

I bought a few postcard photos of some of the team in the club shop (a portacabin) and then we went to wait outside the players’ carpark. There, I got several of the pictures autographed, and Dorothy took two photographs of me with players: Kazimierz Deyna and Gary Owen.

Deyna was the Polish World Cup captain at the time and a quality midfield player. Because of injury, he only made 38 appearances for City, scoring 12 goals. I saw two of them that night – even though we lost 3-2 to visitors Aston Villa.

Owen was one of our homegrown young stars. He was also the only player that I ever had a crush on – my footballing priorities were never about sex.

I look gauche as all hell on the pictures. In one sense, I hate them. But I also love them too, because in this very new world for Manchester City fans, they're evidence that I am not a bandwagon jumper.

More evidence can be found in a ring I still have – a Christmas present from Fairfield friends Susan Prince and, I think, Kay Grimshaw. It was a typical 1970s stainless still job, with an enamelled crest on top.

Some years ago, I was travelling north to a game and was offered a tenner for it by a fellow passenger. No way. Even if I was broke, that's a sentimental item I’d hate to be parted from.

It was also on a finger the day we won the title in May 2012. It was on my hand again last Sunday, when we handed out a serious thrashing to Manchester United that left me, once again, without much of a voice. Four goals = four screams = half a voice left.

Oh City, City, City: how can I explain my love for you? A love that has, over the years, been so often tested by the most dismal performances; by an unparalleled ability to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory; by off-pitch shenanigans; by farce masquerading as tragedy.

I recall a midweek League Cup game at Anfield when we lost 6-0, followed by a Saturday league match at Maine Road, just days later and also against Liverpool, when we lost 4-0.

“Alan Ball’s a football genius!” we sang at the then coach, who eventually emerged from the dug out to rather drily applaud.

And “We’ll score again, don’t know where, don’t know when, but I know we’ll score again some sunny day.”

Or at Bramall Lane for a fixture against Sheffield United, with the Blades fans chanting: “We hate Wednesday, we hate Wednesday,” to which our retort was: “We hate Saturday, we hate Saturday”.

Yet in May 1999, I came away from Wembley in the full and certain knowledge that that afternoon’s win against Gillingham in the Division II play-off final had been one of the greatest days in my life.

A word here, though, for the Gills fans, who were superb that day and well into a somewhat drunken evening.

And that’s without going over the story of 13 May 2012 when we won the title in extra time, in the kost dramatic fashion possible, and were crowned England’s champions for the first time in 44 years.

Another sketch. Tony Coton this time

In a nomadic life, City has, since I was around 13 or 14, remained a constant. Often a constant misery, a constant disappointment – but a constant nonetheless.

And these days, it is no longer quite like that.

On Sunday, I took the train to Manchester for the game against Salford United.

I was the first home game this season that I could get to.

And it was a wonder. If the 6-1 at The Swamp two years ago is already legend, this may well end up being even more so. Because while that certainly owed something to flukishness, with one of their side sent off with almost half the game to go, and many of our goals coming on the counter, this did not.

At 4-1, the scoreline might not have seemed as dramatic, but the performance was arguably much more so.

It was sandwiched between a Champions’ League away win in the Czech Republic (3-0) and a 5-0 drubbing of Wigan, who, only a few months ago, were much the better team on the day when they beat us 1-0 in the FA Cup Final at Wembley.

I’m no mathematician, but three games, 12 goals for and just one against is looking pretty good. The big, BIG test will come next week, when we face reigning champions Bayern München in the Champions’ League.

But hell – we’re IN the Champions’ League! And that is sort of match we all dreamed of for years.

We might have started the season in an mixed fashion, as new coach Manuel Pellegrini got his feet properly under the table and then faced some crucial injuries, but in the last week, we seem to have been on fire.

The Engineer is doing well: with Kompany and Nastasic back, central defence is solid, meaning that Yaya Touré can move further forward.

Indeed, Pellegrini’s decision to switch Yaya with Fernandinho, leaving the Brazilian further back, looked superb on Sunday.

Kolarov, who is unquestionably good in attack, even looked the part in defence at the weekend, and Clichy is now fit again.

Džeko is looking revitalised by a coach who, by all accounts, doesn’t work on the basis of hairdryers, grand funks, not talking to anyone or only talking to the press.

Oh, and before you think otherwise, I still love Roberto, but just understand that he had taken us as far as he could.

Football – I love you. Even though I wasn’t supposed to.

And City: one of the few constants in my life, I love you too. It may not be the case, but I do suspect that, if you cut me, I’d bleed blue.

And there’s very little that could better the catharsis of that day in May 2012. Or last Sunday.

Musical tales from the mists of time

Mists. Of time or otherwise.

Way back in the mists of time – or the beginning of the 1980s, as it is sometimes known – I entertained ideas of a very specific career.

I wanted to be a singer.

My music teachers considered it far from impossible: Noel McKee – probably the best teacher I ever had in any subject, throughout my entire schooling – believed that I had a very “Russian middle register”.

Other teachers and tutors later said that, while I didn’t have perfect pitch, I had perfect tone. Which doesn’t sound bad, really, even viewed through the prism of several intervening decades.

I was a mezzo – which often seemed to me to be something of a neither-here-nor-there sort of voice, but wasn’t.

Unfortunately, despite the extraordinary help and support of Noel over my three years at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School, I couldn’t quite make up the lost ground on theory that had occurred at Fairfield, where my O’ level music lessons had been a dreadful experience – characterised in my memory by a bullying approach from the teacher, that I excluded myself from on mornings by walking (slowly) to school with a claim of bus problems.

It was an approach that, no matter how bad I was at some other subjects, I never extended to any other lesson or course.

Now for clarity, I could never have sung Wagner – or Verdi or Puccini or any other grand opera, for that matter. There was no way that I had that level of voice.

But light opera, operetta, oratorio and lieder were well within my vocal capabilities.

I would love to have sung Gilbert and Sullivan with the D’Oyly Carte.

But hey ho – it wasn’t to be.

It’s not snide to say that parental support was not all it could have been.

My father had paid one of his church organists to teach me some basic piano many years earlier, but it was dire.

Dull lessons that inspired nobody. Indeed, I don’t recall, at that point, being particularly enthused about learning. I suspect the decision that I should be taught was a combination of our having a piano in the house – thanks to my mother’s parents – and some cock-eyed idea of respectably-educated young gals, combined with one of an even more respectable young woman who could play the organ in church.

That I later pretty much taught myself is at least a suggestion that, with a good teacher, I might have prospered more, earlier.

That I taught myself via a piano score of Oliver! is even more of an indication that the parental choice of music was hardly inspirational.

But that was a theme that was to be repeated over and again.

By the second half of the 1970s, I was regularly competing in an annual local festival in Ashton-under-Lyne, in a variety of categories – including singing.

My parents exercised a certain amount of control over what I sang. Hymns were expected – or old songs like Cherry Ripe, which came out of a brown leather-clad tome that almost seemed to take on the status of family heirloom. I think I still have it somewhere.

I combined a lack of inspiration with nerves. Not good.

Later, in Lancaster, I carried on this trend – albeit tempered by Noel accompanying me for rather better pieces (a bit of Mozart, some Rachmaninov, Schubert …).

But looking back, I realise that I had the most extraordinarily limited knowledge of what was possible.

Nor were my parents particularly encouraging in other ways.

When I sang the mezzo/alto solo in an all-female arrangement of Fauré’s magnificent requiem in a big concert at school, they didn’t attend. I remember my mother sniffily noting that it was Catholic music.

It was actually staged at St Martin’s College – beyond, even, the school hall.

Oh goodness, there were nerves. I remember standing there, score in hand, with Noel before me as conductor, coaxing me, encouraging me – because he believed in me and knew I could do it.

But my parents couldn’t put their own beliefs aside to attend such an occasion.

The school was not Catholic. Noel was an Anglican.

But my parents could not set aside their own beliefs aside to support their own daughter.

These days I have no belief left in any god that has been described by any human civilisation.

But it doesn’t mean that I cannot still take great joy in music that was written for religious purposes. Only yesterday, I listened to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis for the first time – wow: simply wow.

Yet my parents could not set aside their most sectarian and puritanical instincts in order to support their own offspring.

Mind, they didn’t attend when I was a soloist when we performed Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols a year or so later either, and Britten was, like us, a Prod.

There are times when I wonder just what they were on.

And do you think I can talk to them about it?

No.

What good would it do? What would be the point?

In so many ways, it would seem so petty; so small-minded and so – arguably – disrespectful of clearly seriously-held beliefs.

Not that I didn’t keep trying, on the singing level, for many years.

Some years later, after I moved south to find work and spent some 18 months living with my parents in Reading and commuting to London every day, we hit a similar situation.

My father was, as that time, minister to a congregation that met at an old – well, ancient really – church in Henley on Thames, shared with the local Anglicans.

A concert was planned, with the Reading Male Voice Choir. They needed a soloist for a couple of interludes. My father volunteered me.

I was still trying to get into the business, and spending money on singing classes with a serious tutor. And I was just starting to understand that there was a whole range of female vocal styles out there that I had hardly even heard of – I’d just, for instance, ‘discovered’, Barbra Streisand.

So, four songs across two interludes.

My parents made it quite clear that they expected hymns or religious songs.

I went down the musicals route. I rehearsed with the conductor/pianist, who was wonderful (and himself, a clergy son).

In the end, the first three songs went – if not badly, then not inspirationally.

But something happened on the fourth. I’d just recently discovered Cole Porter’s Everytime We Say Goodbye (thanks to Mick Hucknell) and amazingly, it came off completely.

It was sung with eyes shut – not as a deliberate choice, but because that was what happened – and I could feel the mood in that ancient building change. For once, I got them and I held them.

I’ve done it again since, a few times – impromptu performances, usually in pubs: Porter again or Gershwin. Getting lost in the music and finding that the audience, in spite of any booze, goes completely quiet and listens.

Like so many other people, my life could have taken all sorts of different directions.

I don’t dislike – never mind hate – where I am now. But I do sometimes wonder about what might have been …

Why has all this come back again right now?

Well, partly because I have had that opportunity – which I’ve explained more than once recently – to listen to music more than usual.

I find myself having a remarkable amount of understanding – but not nearly as much as if I’d carried on with my music studies.

And perhaps rather unusually for me, I find myself regretting that I stopped learning about music for so long. Because going back to it now, with some intensity, reminds me of just how much it means to me.