THIS IS CAVAN!!!

Got a text from one of the mothers,

‘Going to be late for the lesson – stuck behind the bloody tractor’.

I started to laugh. I thought, ‘Where else would you get that….! Only in Cavan’. I had a quick coffee and started to drive to the academy. After a while I stopped laughing as I got stuck in the middle of a tiny country lane. There were six or seven runaway cows, blocking the way. They were lonely. They didn’t want me to go. They wanted to communicate. One of them came close and said, ‘Mooo?’. I would’ve said ‘yes’, but a farmer appeared out of nowhere. He was grumpy. He looked like hangover Santa. He had things sticking out of his beard. He looked at me and muttered something about ‘them forins’. He kicked and pushed cows off the road and he called them names. One of the cows kept looking at me. She had big, beautiful, sad eyes. One thing I know for sure. I’m never going to have a steak again.

Those big eyes reminded me of something which happened a while ago.

Meet Susie and Rosie. They are sisters and they are my violin students. They are tiny, they are well-behaved and they are very sweet. Their dad is a firefighter. He is bigger than Pavarotti. When we first met he gave me a handshake and nearly dislocated my wrist. I know he meant well but now I keep my distance and wave. Once I heard him sneeze. He nearly took a window out. He has to duck and turn sideways in order to go through the door without taking the frame out. He needs two chairs to sit comfortably, but he manages with just one because he is extremely shy. The difference in size between him and girls is incredible. He can carry them in his pockets, easily. 

Girls play tiny violins which are so small that they don’t look like real instruments, they look like toys. And they sound horrendous (violins, not girls). Girls sound great. They have a very specific accent. They say, ‘Da..’ instead of ‘Dad’, ‘Fatha..’ instead of ‘Father’, ‘Wha..’ instead of ‘What’, ‘Oleee..’ instead of ‘Oleg’ and so on. It sounds very cute.

Girls learn hard and do everything I ask, but their violins still sound horrible. Even Paganini would sound like a cat with diarrhoea if you present him with something which was put together by Chinese prisoners. It breaks my heart. I try to distract them with different exercises. I say, ‘Ladies! Put your violins down, we are going to do a bit of singing…’. Even though they want to please their ‘Da’,  they gladly put them away.

That’s exactly what we did. ‘Da’ just left for the bathroom, and one of the violins went on the chair. Girls were trying to sing a short melody I played on the piano. We were so busy, we didn’t even hear when ‘Da’ came in. We only heard a ‘crunch’ when he sat on the violin. Then I heard a little ‘squeak’ from Rosie. Everyone’s eyes were on ‘Da’. He froze. He pretended he didn’t notice anything. He couldn’t understand what was happening. He just wanted us to stop staring at him, to continue the lesson and stop making his life too complicated. I could see that he wanted to disappear altogether as his face started to turn bright red. He was ashamed, he was suffering and he was in pain. Little cutie’s eyes started to fill up with tears, and she whispered, ‘Da….!!!’. 

He gave up. He got off the chair and we all looked at the pancake which used to be a violin once. It didn’t even look like a violin, it looked like a ‘Dream Catcher’- one of those things you hang outside and then sit and watch parts suspended on a string, rotating and banging against each other. ‘Da’ took the mess, which turned out to be much longer than the violin itself used to be, held it up, looked at me with his big, sad eyes and asked,

‘Can you fix tha…?’.

I am proud of myself. I didn’t laugh, but only God knows what it cost me. I nearly choked, but I kept a straight face. 

Rosie is growing up, so she’ll get a bigger violin soon.