No news on the job situation! I’ve had a couple of calls now from agencies, but no job as yet. Hopefully something will turn up soon — but I do believe that God has these things under control 🙂
Anyway. I’ve just thought of something I could write as part of my new ‘content’ drive rather than just a ‘what I did today’ drive! Shocking, I know, but there you go… Whilst I have been waiting for a job, I’ve had quite a bit of spare time. I’ve decided to enjoy it, because I won’t have this much time off in a while! So I’ve started playing the piano again. Or, trying to.
I did my piano grade 4 in December 2000, and hadn’t played until about a month ago. Now, I’ve been practising for about an hour or so a day every day for the past few weeks. (Bear with me here, I know this is a bit boring but I do have a point!) I was always absolutely appalling at sight-reading, and it took me quite a long time to learn any new pieces. This was a bit of a vicious circle — I didn’t enjoy playing much (and consequently didn’t play a lot) because it took me so long to learn anything, and it took me so long to learn anything because I didn’t play much!
The point is this. Most of the people I know who are any good at piano have been playing since an early age (5 or 6, something like that). Now, I was wondering — is it possible for me (with practice) to become a relatively adequate pianist (I’m not hoping for concert standard or anything, just plain old adequate would do for me), given that I didn’t start learning the piano until I was 12 or 13? Is it simply a factor of practice, or is it actually a factor of how early you start playing? Does starting to play at an early age somehow embed it into your brain more? Does starting at an older age limit how good you can become?
I’ll let you know how I get on… I would imagine all starting at an early age would mean was that you have more years to practice (finding time to practice does seem to become more difficult as you get older). We’ll see (hopefully some of that made sense…)
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