Multiple-choice reading

I bought the cello on my forty-sixth birthday, which is, I am reliably informed, about four decades too late. The man in the shop did not say so. He was far too polite, and in any case, I suspect he had sold instruments to people like me before: adults with a little money, a long-held ambition and no idea at all what they were letting themselves in for. He showed me how to hold the bow, watched me drag it across the open strings, and said, with what I now recognise as heroic tact, that the tone was 'promising'.

Anyone who has taken up an instrument in adulthood will know what followed. For the first six months, the sounds I produced ranged from the mournful to the frankly alarming. My family developed a sudden interest in activities that took place outside the house. I practised for half an hour every evening, and every evening I discovered new ways in which my body could fail to do what I asked of it. The left hand would find the note a fraction too late; the right arm, trying to compensate, would press too hard; the result was a noise my teenage son described, not unkindly, as 'a gate that needs oiling'.

I tried, at first, to solve the problem the way I had solved problems at work: by planning. I drew up a practice schedule, divided into scales, studies and pieces, and kept a notebook in which I recorded the minutes spent on each. The notebook lasted three weeks. It turned out that the cello did not much care how organised I was. Progress, when it came, came unevenly, in sudden small leaps after long stretches in which nothing seemed to change at all, and no schedule I could devise made those leaps arrive any sooner.

What I had not anticipated was how much this would affect me. I had spent twenty years in a job I was good at, and I had grown used, without ever quite noticing, to the feeling of competence. Being a beginner again stripped that away. There were evenings when I put the cello back in its case after ten minutes, not because I was tired but because I could not face hearing myself any longer. My teacher, a brisk woman in her sixties who had taught children for most of her career, told me that adults found this stage far harder than children did. Children, she said, expect to be bad at things. Adults have forgotten how.

It is fashionable to claim that adult learners have hidden advantages: better concentration, a clearer understanding of what they want, the discipline to practise. There is something in this, but I distrust the cheerfulness with which it is usually said. Concentration is of limited use when your fingers have not yet learned where to go, and discipline is easier to admire than to sustain at the end of a working day. The honest truth is that I will never play as well as someone who started at seven, and no amount of motivation will change that. I have stopped expecting it to.

Something else has happened instead. About a year in, I noticed that I had begun to listen differently. Music I had loved for decades revealed things I had never heard: the way a cellist breathes before a phrase, the tiny hesitation before a high note that makes it sound like an effort and therefore like a triumph. I had always listened as a member of the audience. Now I was listening, however clumsily, as someone who knew from the inside how hard it was. The pleasure was not smaller for being more technical; if anything, it was greater.

Last month I played in public for the first time, at a concert for adult learners in a church hall. My piece lasted just under three minutes, and I made at least four mistakes that I am aware of. Nobody seemed to mind. Afterwards a woman who had played the flute, rather worse than I had played the cello, came up and told me she had been waiting thirty years to do what she had just done. I knew exactly what she meant. It was not a performance in any sense a professional would recognise. But it was, for both of us, a kind of arrival.