Suprises

Don't you love it when you find you are capable of surprising yourself?

For many years I have been secretly jealous of my younger brother's ability to just pick up any instrument and just play it. Trumpet, guitar, piano and recently rather bizarrely some strange wooden two tubed recorder type penny whistle thing! But newho. I had piano lessons for... oh year 4 till 6th form, but always rather struggled. I don't find reading music easy- I can do it but not always with the speed needed to play from it. As a result I play a fair bit from ear and try to listen out if I get a note wrong. This is fairly obviously not a smart move because I only pick up mistakes after I make them. But non-the-less that is how I have worked for many years using the written music as a starting point and a guide as to roughly where the music is going. It makes playing anything with black notes quite hard as well. Now don't get me wrong I did quite well at piano (I hold grade 5!) but it used to take me ages to learn the pieces (because I tended to end up doing them by heart) and sight reading- now just don't get me started on that. I have always wanted to be able to play by chords, as Jonathan can (by this I mean not having a full stave but just the letter names of the chords). But always figured that I didn't know my scales well enough to be able to do it- I also had no idea where to start.

This friday though I handed over a copy of 'Before the throne of God above' with just the chords to Philippe at choir practice. He managed with a practiced ease to produce a fab accompaniment that just made the song. Afterwards he was showing Armelle how to do it. Pick out the tune with the right hand and simply hit the base note of the chord with the left hand at the right time. To her this seemed still very impressive, but to me- it all became a bit clearer. I have a good ear for picking out tune on the piano so I thought I could try this. So later (when there was no-one around) I had a go. Well you certainly got the idea of what I was playing!.

Sunday afternoon Nina, Josine and I stayed behind to have a play on the piano after choir practice. I wasn't in a great mood. Philippe wasn't there and hearing 'Before the throne of God above' sung without piano reminded me of why I had tried to suggest we didn't sing that one. But then I tried my hand at playing by chords on a few other songs. I love how simple most christian songs are (as long as I don't try to play any tim huges!) and by the end was rather proud of how good it was sounded. This 'good' is of course compared with what I was expecting to be able to do, so don't assume that I am now a fab pianist. Though the others did seem to like it. I was happy.

Sunday evening the youth went round to Jamel's again, and this time I remembered to indulge in some 'pill popping' before hand so had no reaction to the cat :)

It was a wonderfully international group with me, the african's (several of the youth are originally from french speaking areas of africa and america), american (Jamel's wife is the daughter of the original american missionary couple who set up the church) and a visiting German guy. It was quite nice in a way to have the common language be something other than english. I love that english is so widely used but allot of the time over here I end up feeling a bit guilty that it is everyone else that is making the effort to learn and speak another language. And this time when chatting with this german guy (Dominic) we were both making the same effort. It was interesting to hear his accent as well. He spoke in the clipped efficiency that german seems to present. It made me wonder again what my accent sounds like to french people. Oh well that will be one of the questions without answers that I ponder on every now and then.