From Tracey Thorn’s column in the New Statesman:
The morning of the US election result I sat down at the piano and tried to play some Beethoven. Bearing in mind that I haven’t played the piano in about 15 years, and haven’t properly practised since I was a teenager, the results were mixed. At first I was tentative and nervous but before too long my mood overtook me, all the shock and anger and frustration and disappointment flooding out in a torrent of hammering and excessive use of the pedal. Reader, it was a cacophony, but it didn’t half make me feel better.
I didn’t want to look at the papers, didn’t want to read any opinion pieces or explanations for what had happened – not yet, at least. I was feeling let down by the news, or by my social media feeds, which I had curated so heavily that I’d avoided seeing what was coming. My little bubble of optimism had kept my spirits up for the last couple of months, but it now seemed a place of utterly fanciful delusion. I had clung to posts saying, “Don’t worry she’s gonna win easily,” taking them as gospel truth, and here was my punishment.
“To hell with social media,” I thought, “it has lied to me.” Deleting Twitter/X from my phone felt therapeutic. By lunchtime I had fully resolved to stop wasting my time online. I rummaged in a cupboard and found more sheet music – Chopin, Mozart, some easy Bach. A book of Debussy, almost none of which I can even attempt. And another containing works by the jazz pianist Bill Evans, including his beautiful “Waltz for Debby”, which I can just about play if you ignore the fact that I’m playing it at half speed, and the fact that on page three when I reach the ominous word “Improvisation” I cough politely and stop.
The thing is I’m not really any good at playing the piano and I’m trying not to let that matter. The concentration required for me even to fumble my way through these pieces is such that there’s no room left in my brain for anything else, hence the feeling of relief. I think it’s called being in the flow state, when you’re fully immersed in something and time seems to become immaterial, passing both fast and slow, unnoticed, unremarked….
Read on here.
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