The Useless Piano That Might Spark Joy

It’s been so long since I’ve blogged. I’ve been putting it off because it’s been a long time, thereby making it even longer since I’ve blogged. I keep doing this. And then I have to keep beginning my posts like someone going to confession. Forgive me, readers ,for I have not written a post for five months.

I’ve had a novel published. This one here, called How To Be Second Best. Just thought I’d get that out there. It was released in Australia a month ago. It’ll come out in Canada some time this year. The rights to publish in the UK, USA and rest of the world are up for grabs so get on it, foreign publishers! There is a paperback, an ebook and an audiobook. People seem to have liked it. I’ve had lots of nice emails from readers, some of whom aren’t even my friends. That’s a bit mind-blowing. It seems to appeal mostly to people around my age, who have children, although my Dad’s friend James, who is in his seventies and has no children, said he laughed out loud at parts and was very pleased when I wrote that the protagonist’s house had two rooms on each side of the hall, not two rooms on either side of the hall. Apparently the second one is incorrect and a particular bugbear of his. I’d like to say I knew this and very deliberately wrote that sentence but that would be untrue. It was luck. But I’m glad James liked it.

Because it is January and I have another book to write, I have been doing a lot of decluttering. I know this is very fashionable because of Marie Kondo and that Netflix show about tidying up and only keeping things that ‘spark joy’, but I only watched a few minutes of the show before I was so bored I decided to tackle the odd sock box. Maybe that’s how it’s meant to work.

Anyway, I prefer the alternative decluttering guru, whom H and I invented. He’s called Murray from Condobolin. This Murray Condo backs a ute up to your house and you throw in everything you hate. Murray then assures you he will dispose of it thoughtfully and recycle everything but deep down you know he drives to the next suburb and dumps it all on the verge.

After the sock box, I decided to tackle H’s office. He works from home, and when we recently gave the kids their own separate rooms, he had to move from the nice quiet upstairs to the room downstairs next to the living room, which the previous owners used as a media room. We have not used it as a media room. We watch media on our laps, like normal people.

Until this room became H’s office, we called it The Chamber of Broken Dreams, because in it we kept all the books we never have time to read, the piano and guitars no one has time to play, the art supplies no one has time to use, and for a while there was an exercise bike no one had time to ride.

Since the kids have stopped being babies, things have improved and the art supplies were used enough for H to have an exhibition last year, I read enough books to figure out how to write one, and we sent the exercise bike to live with a nice family on a farm. So it worked to move H’s office in there. Except for the piano. The piano meant there was no room for any storage furniture so all his files are on a busted old bookshelf and they just sit there looking horrible and not sparking joy. They need to go in a cupboard.

But what can we do with the piano? H bought it after we met but before we moved in together. It was old and out of tune then. It remains thus. He plays quite well, but not often. I play not at all, except for the opening notes of ‘Beautiful Girl’ by INXS, which I taught myself when I was bored in the summer of 1993.

Last weekend we decided to get rid of the piano, which seems to be something you can only do by giving it away for free to anyone who will come and remove it. For it is a very heavy beast, and we once had a friend help us move it and he didn’t talk to us for fourteen months after. Things came good with him eventually, but now he’s H’s business partner and we really can’t risk another schism in the relationship. Someone else must take it away.

Having settled upon it going, we immediately went to a secondhand furniture warehouse and bought a cupboard to put in its place. A cupboard with lovely wooden doors behind which we can hide all sorts of shit. I said I’d list the piano on Freecycle and it would be gone by the time the cupboard arrived.

Well that would all have been fine, if I hadn’t listened to the soundtrack to Jane campion’s movie The Piano on the way home from our friends’ house last night. I was dragged, like Holly Hunter with a rope caught around her ankle, into a sea of 1993 nostalgia. (What is it with me and 1993?) I remembered I wanted to learn to play the piano. And be a mute Scotswoman married to Sam Neill while having an affair with Harvey Keitel. (I was a bit of a weird fourteen-year-old.)

So we’re keeping the piano. My plan is we will stuff it into the small cupboard when that arrives. Because one day, I’ll put on a bonnet and play the piano and it will spark so much joy that this decision will make sense.