My late father’s Broadwood baby grand piano entertained my sister and me throughout our early childhood. The sounds of Chopin mazurkas and Beethoven sonatas lulled us towards the land of nod each night. Towards the end of his life, the quality of my father’s playing went downhill in direct proportion to the amount of Noilly Prat he had imbibed. Practising the same piece night after night did not in his case make perfect. He was a past master at practising ‘in’ the same mistakes ad nauseam. You dreaded the glitches just as you dreaded the anticipated scratches on well-worn vinyl of the day. When the time came to vacate my mother’s successfully sold single-storey dwelling on the Isle of Anglesey, we found there were no takers for large brown furniture – very few households have room for a baby grand. And our cottage was no exception. I simply couldn’t watch...
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