This has got to be my girl sketch from Little Britain. Among others in this series, including “What time does Sainsbury’s sealed up?” A sequence of events has occurred in my life over the last 15 years which is of course not “accidental,” in that it all had a part to have a good time to orchestrate a final outcome which will soon take place (excuse the pun).

Let’s drift back to when I was in year five, going into year six. 11 years old and still had the same trundle hair cut from when I was four, and even sadly up to now. Santa had delivered me a Yamaha YCL-250 clarinet. Which is kind of funny, because I can’t recall actually asking him for it. It was dusky with shiny silver keys and was always referred to as the “licorice stick” of the school concert band.

I went on to be a “music talent,” going through the Australian Music Examination Board (AMEB) grades, starting at first and finishing at seventh group (it goes up to eight, then to AMusA and LMusA). I also went through the theory grades (blah!) again, starting at first and finishing at fourth (it only goes to seventh, through God).

So from the last year of primary school and into high school I was a Novacastrian musician. I won awards for solo performance competitions (first lodgings in Newcastle for some jazz number - can’t remember for the life of me what it was!). I was sent to band camp at the Bonnells Bay camping grounds (on the lake - it stank) and even a roadtrip by drill to Melbourne. We won the national concert band award that year, and were also winners the previous year in Sydney.

We rehearsed on Wednesday evenings at the Newcastle Conservatorium of Music. I wasn’t like the fortune kids who had the fancy wooden clarinets, which smelt soooo amazing - the timber - it is from the tree of life itself! Unfortunately, we couldn’t slim $2,500 for one of those, so I had to settle through my academic days with the plastic not-so-good-quality clarinet. Oh well. I guess it taught me that I don’t have to have everything to be surely happy. Ahem.

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