And so Trevor Wye, of the Kent Rural Music School, started the daunting task of teaching me the hautbois. He was then bearded and drove a three-wheeled car. A flautist (I think he played in the London Symphony Orchestra at the time), he taught all the woodwind instruments to a varied bunch of boys and girls (the latter from the girls grammar school around the corner). Trevor Wye is still very active, I'm pleased to discover.

The fact that girls were involved was an added incentive, even though the really attractive ones showed little interest in anything other than being really attractive girls. Ho hum.

Having squawked and puffed my way though a year of lessons I duly played in the Borden Grammar School orchestra, in a somewhat disastrous performance of Bach's Christmas Oratorio. At the time the (borrowed) oboe I played tasted of burnt cloth, which was the result of my getting a cleaning rag stuck in it and my mother's resolution of the crisis by burning it out using a red hot poker.

Being assured that I was now committed to the oboe, my parents acquired a R. Malerne conservatoire system oboe for me, an instrument I still have (and have recently had overhauled, so it plays better than it has for ages). There followed many happy years of playing in all sorts of orchestras and ensembles, with the annual Gilbert and Sullivan operettas being perhaps the most fun.

Any musician will tell many funny stories, so I won't, other than the time, as I just finished playing the solo at the beginning of Rossini's The Italian Girl In Algiers overture in a school hall in Canterbury, the rather charming second oboist fell into my lap. Oh and there was that time during a performance of Maid of the Mountains in Ennis, Ireland, when the orchestra pit filled to the brim with dry ice mist and we could no longer see our scores...

I've carried on playing the oboe, latterly in Nottingham, with great pleasure but only average ability, mostly the result of lack of practice.

On visiting Ireland in the mid 70s, however, I was captivated by folk music, and took up the penny whistle (or tin whistle). This lead eventually to the formation of the Windy Mills Ceilidh Dance Band, in Hexham, with my lodger and co-founder, and actually the more hard-working and talented partner, David Hollingsworth. I moved on after a few years, but I noticed the other day that the Windy Mills Band is still going strong.

Music is still very important to me. I listen to it all day, classical, folk, minimalist, Joan Armatrading, the Pogues, etc. etc.

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