Getting into the Swing of it...

If you're not interested in piano-playing, please feel free to give this entry a body-swerve. My new found piano teacher is on her summer vacation. We're talking the whole of the six week break here. I have not used this as an excuse for shirking. Oh dear me no. Piles of laundry reproach me from the corner of my eye (as dear Ewelina is also on her summer sabbatical) and as for dust... well, I'm adopting the Quentin Crisp approach. After four years, you really don't see it. Because every idle moment when I'm not watering a garden, I am practising my pieces on the piano.
Sandra, my teacher, before she sallied off, left me with Surfboard Boogie by Martha Mier. Oh, this in my kind of music. Yes, I love the Mozart (just one piece, before you think I'm coming  over all grand) but in my mind's ear when I started out on learning the piano, this was what I imagined I might one day be playing. Such a simple soul.
As soon as I worked through the first page, I was enraptured by the familiar sound of either a boogie or a woogie. The brick wall came on page two when the seductively simple arrangement of notes, no matter how fast I played them sounded nothing like the You Tube demonstration. (So helpful but only so far.)
Darlings, I had no swing. Nope, no swing at all. No matter, how many times I played the demo (once fooling Him-in-the-next-room into thinking I might have a marketable talent after all) it still sounded incontrovertibly wrong.
A friend of mine came round for lunch yesterday. She doesn't play the piano, or even read music, but as a former dancer, she does understand rhythm. Beverley rut-tut-tutted the rhythm in my ear and suddenly my fingers began to find the swing that my classically trained fingers (Do you like that? Makes me crease!) had failed to find.
This morning I went back to it as soon as I had waived Dearest off. Bloody hell. I was back where I started. Then all of a sudden, I started rut-tut-tutting, and the fingers obeyed.

There hasn't been so much rutting and tutting in here since we watched The Game of Thrones last week. But I'm having such a lovely time. Now that I've found the right time..