annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary

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Day 101

The theme for the Friday writing group was lies. We were invited to write something untrue about what we'd been doing in lockdown.

I started learning the piano at the beginning of lockdown. I've never played a musical instrument before and decided to teach myself with a book and some Youtube videos. It seemed easy enough but kind of dull, so when a woman popped up on the local Facebook page offering lessons via Facetime, I jumped at it. She was fabulous. like a piano whisperer. She told me I had an innate talent and to just relax, let my focus on the sheet music soften and let my hands take over. She was right, it was magical. Suddenly my hands connected to the music via my eyes directly, bypassing the brain, reading it all intuitively. She was amazed - she'd known I was good but I was more than good, I was brilliant, a prodigy. A couple of weeks in, her husband came into her room while I was playing. He signed me up straight away for last month's live online concert for the NHS. I was the soloist playing Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto on a grand piano that was delivered and set up in a summerhouse they had built for me. News of my performance travelled far and wide - there was a global audience of 100s of millions. I'm not going to keep it up though - I want to play bass guitar.

Love the Way You Lie

Geraldine was a natural liar, a total fantasist. We were both teenagers then. I was eighteen and assumed she was the same sort of age. I never dreamed she'd lie to me - it was years before I discovered that actually she'd been thirteen not seventeen, and was on the run from an abusive, neglectful home. She hadn't mentioned that. The rest of us had left school that hot summer and all descended on the house of a girl whose parents had gone away for three weeks. It was a big stone house with walled gardens. Loads of us slept there, including Geraldine who just slotted in. We all thought someone else knew her, but didn't bother about it, just rolled another spliff, turned the volume up on Led Zep and carried on. The police stopped us on the way into town, on my moped, me and Geri, barefoot, no helmets, long hair blowing out behind us. She told them she was a ballerina, currently living in a tent on Box Hill.

Today I did housework. Not much, but I cleaned the hob and the doors on the cupboards in the kitchen. Then I had a lie down.

Also went up to the horses field with my sister which was cool, though disappointingly the traffic is back to normal. It has been blissfully quiet up there, but now there's that underlying hum. You can't escape it in the south of England, anywhere. But we had a couple of months off.

12:55 a.m. - 21.06.20

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