letter #70 One, Two; One Two Three Four

A story and a piece of market research

My dear friend, I hope this email finds you less obsessed than I am with the insta feed of Christ’s Hospital School. I’m one hundred percent certain that you are indeed less obsessed with them than I am, because I can’t look away. Is it the Tudor uniform? Is it marching into lunch in time to the school band? Is it the matron doing a button check on the uniforms? My dear friend, it is all these things plus many, many more. You can thank me later.

A fingernail moon at ten minute (approx) intervals as seen on my evening preambulation along The Esplanade earlier this week.

Besides scrolling that feed, I have been standing in the garage with my hands on my hips looking at the drum kit I bought from a local facebook group for $100.

You might remember that I gave up the auctions a few years ago and although I’m often tempted by Scammell’s and other local auction houses, I have resisted logging back in or (re)downloading the apps. However, I saw this post about the drums on the facebook group in the days after I had finished writing the script for my fourth annual world famous live Christmas letter reading and before staging the actual show. I had finished the script with time to spare and was living in an endorphin-fuelled buoyant haze of ‘how-good-is-life-I-must-not-waste-a-single-moment-of-this-glorious-thing-called-life.’

Despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, when I saw that post on the facebook group I believed that I could—that I would—learn to play the drums. I had always wanted to play the drums, and the only reason I had so far failed in this task (I now realised) was the absence of a drum kit in my life. Not only that, but learning to play the drums would be an excellent addition to my comprehensive program to ward off cognitive decline (on which more later).

When I answered the post on the facebook page, the woman selling the drums not only replied immediately but also offered to drop the drums to my house straight away. I thought to myself, ‘How nice is that?’ Not realising that she was thinking to herself, ‘I’d better get that drum kit off to her before someone in her family says, “Mum/Tracy WTF are you thinking, why don’t you focus on the piano/flute/guitar/banjo/ukulele/synthesiser you already have?”’(To be fair to me, I am actually not too bad on the piano and have passed a significant number of AMEB exams because my mum made me go to piano lessons; and I’m passably good at three chords on the guitar; and I can do two two-octave scales on the flute; and I can do two rolling chords on the banjo; and with a passing glance at youtube pretty much anyone can do happy birthday on the ukulele).

When this generous woman arrived with the drum kit she also helped me carry it piece-by-piece into my house. Looking at the drum kit in pieces in my front room was the first time I understood something about drum kits: they are enormous. I thought to myself: ‘I don’t think Adrian is going to love this.’

At this time Adrian was, in fact, on a trip out to Salisbury to collect two chairs I’d bought on facebook marketplace a few nights earlier when I realised there had been a mix-up with the booking (mix-up in this instance meaning I hadn’t made the booking) and the chairs I usually hire for the set for the world famous Christmas letter reading weren’t available.

At first I thought I would cover the drum kit with a bedsheet; but there were two problems. First, one sheet is not enough to cover a drum kit. Second, when he saw the drum kit covered with one sheet, my youngest child pointed out that the sheet did not make the drum kit look invisible, rather it looked like I was trying to hide something under a sheet. I said, ‘I could tell Adrian it’s his Christmas present and he mustn’t look.’ Even I knew that wouldn’t work.

I once explained to a friend, ‘I don’t actually hide the things I buy from Adrian, but sometimes I put them in places where I think he won’t see them.’ This was at a time when I was spending a lot of time at auctions and bringing home things that, in retrospect, we maybe didn’t need (eg a set of six wire chairs from a tennis club that I thought would look cool in the front yard but actually just looked like someone had dumped six rusty chairs in our front yard). My friend pointed out that purposely putting things in places so that people wouldn’t see them was in fact the definition of ‘hiding’; and that was the point at which I logged out of all my accounts and deleted the apps and I haven’t brought any rusty chairs home since.

With this in mind, you don’t need a degree in psychology to work out that when I was trying to hide the drum kit from Adrian I wasn’t really trying to hide the drum kit from Adrian at all. I was, as I so often am, trying to hide myself from myself. I was trying to be less like myself and more like someone who doesn’t impulsively say, ‘I’d love it!’ when she sees someone offering a drum kit for $100.

Visiting a friend’s house for Christmas drinks a few days later I told them about this drum kit. My friend registered no surprise at this story. In fact, she gave me a set of drumsticks she had been storing in her cutlery drawer ever since she gave them to her partner as a gift that he had never used. How cool are drumsticks? It turns out all I really wanted to do was hold the drumsticks above my head, and tap them together while saying, ‘One, two, one, two, three, four.’

I do want to find a new home for the drum kit because even unassembled it takes up a lot of space in the garage. And until I put the drum kit in the garage I was extremely pleased with the degree of order and space I had created over the last couple of years as part of my assessment of my Unfinished Business. Finding a new home for the drums is a project for May.

And now for my piece of market research. My program to kick the can of cognitive decline as far down the road as I can includes a rigorous regime of balance work. One of my favourite exercises is to stand on one leg (and foot) while I put my sock and shoe on the other foot. My market research question is this: If I made a video of myself doing that exercise would you be interested in watching it?

I will write again soon probably with no updates on the drum kit. Until then, I will think of you often and with love

Your friend, Tracy xx