Were you travelling this Christmas? If so, how was your journey? I have always hated journeys. I like arrivals. I see the journey as merely the means to an arrival. This can manifest itself in any number of ways. It means driving or running through the countryside and checking a watch rather than the scenery. It means speed-reading a book so as to finish it. It means completing any number of potentially diverting tasks with the sole focus of progressing to the next one. Better to travel hopefully than arrive, the saying goes. I was never big on that.
But I’m rethinking, and this year the catalyst for that was a piano exam. A few years ago, as a lover of jazz and an admirer of musicians, I decided to take up the piano. In relative terms, it was all a bit late. I didn’t expect much. I merely nursed the hope that one day, for a few fleeting seconds, I would be proficient enough to play a quiet sombre tune on a grand piano in a top-floor penthouse overlooking central Manhattan. As occurs in the best films.
That aim seemed modest enough, But then I was told about the exams. You should do exams, came the advice, it focuses the mind. And suddenly the playing wasn’t the thing, it was the exams. You can pass them, and that’s great, but you can fail them too. That’s bad, very bad. That’s like a journey with no end point. A maze, an endless spinning carousel. Arrive, you must pass. You must arrive.
But I didn’t. Instead at the Blackheath Conservatoire, in southeast London – a place that, as its title suggests, nurtures artistic excellence – I stupendously failed to reach the destination of piano grade two. Yes grade two. The one that 10-year-olds and precocious five-year-olds on YouTube pass with merits blindfolded in their sleep. Instead I had a meltdown: arms immobile, brain clouded by fog, eyes seeing notes as mosquitoes pirouetting on the page.
It lasted 12 minutes and that might not sound long. But picture 12 minutes of helplessness; 12 minutes of drowning. Twelve minutes of smiles from an examiner who knew the shambles he saw left little room for doubt and even less for lenience. The result, when it came weeks later, brought no surprises, but it did provide a reassuring clarity. Not failure by a hair’s breadth or the single mistake that might haunt one’s sleep. This was overwhelming deficiency, failure to reach the destination by a country mile.
What’s an arrivophile to do after that? I abandoned the trip entirely. And for a month or two I actually truly enjoyed the freedom of not having to practice, and of not feeling guilty when doing something else. I read a bit more, soaked in the bath, watched sport while sitting close enough to the piano keys to see them gathering dust. But all the while there was a voice in my head, an amalgam of responses I had when I first wrote about my exam debacle this summer. Just keep playing, said the emails and tweets. Forget the exam. Forget the destination. Just travel.
And one evening, waiting for the second half of a Premier League game to begin, I inexplicably drifted over to the keyboard and started fumbling a D minor scale. Then E major. Then, from memory, one of the pieces that so spectacularly crash landed in the examination: I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande. None of it passed muster. Certainly there was nothing to match the smart-alecky kids on YouTube. But there was something else in the re-engagement: a spiritual sort of comfort, like the meeting of two people who have been through trauma and later reconnect. And so that’s what I have been doing. Just travelling.
That doesn’t mean I have no interest in what happened before and why. Piano TV, a YouTube channel, says adult would-be pianists intent on reaching the promised land of garlands and cardboard certificates fail to reach it all the time.
There are as many as 12 common problems they encounter, according to Piano TV’s Allysia. One is that they immediately demand to be better than they are. That was me. Sometimes, without parents or figures of seniority to chivvy them on, they get lazy. That was me too. They get waylaid by the “drill sergeant” of the mind: that inner voice that gathers up a lifetime’s doubts to tell you that you’re over the hill and in over your head. I often met him halfway through the accurate playing of a piece. A mistake would quickly follow.
They suffer performance anxiety, playing not with childish insouciance but with all the pressure of their own self-worth. A mistake is never just a mistake. It becomes “a reflection of you as a person”. Yep, yep, yep.
But that was then. So off we go again. Maybe to a destination – maybe even Blackheath – but maybe just on a journey that doesn’t go any place. Might as well try to enjoy life’s excursions. Too soon, they all end up in the same place.
• Hugh Muir is a Guardian columnist
