Author: Ask

When my younger daughter was 6 years old she wanted to learn the violin. I had also wanted to learn to play it and was actually offered a chance to have free lessons in my junior school, but my Dad wouldn’t let me. He filled a few old glass milk bottles with water, tapped them and asked me which was higher and which was lower. His scientific conclusion was that I would be rubbish! So a few decades later, I was very happy to take my daughter to violin lessons with a fascinating Polish nonagenarian gentleman called Mr. Szistowski in Bradford. His house was like a museum, full of violins, and the toilet upstairs, accessed via a grand wooden staircase, had a huge wide wooden toilet seat nearly a meter wide!

We ended up sharing the 45 minute lesson, so I could learn to help my daughter practice. Then we started going to Cleckheaton Music Centre together, and I joined in too, along with all the other young children. Then one day we performed in a concert along with children from other schools in what was then the McAlpine Stadium, and I met another mother who also played the violin and viola (by then I was also playing the viola) , while her two sons, played the the cello and double bass. A few years later, I photographed her sons playing their Instruments in a room with sunlight streaming through the vertical blinds.

The boy’s mother loved it so much, she decided to commission a painting from me. No price was discussed, but she paid a hundred pounds deposit and waited for her painting. It was a very long wait, but she never gave up hope. Years passed, and I even photographed the older one’s wedding!