Violin

There aren’t any pictures of me playing the violin as a child but these of my own children starting up are very sweet.

Their starting to play reminded me how beautiful violins are. Sometime not that long after taking them I went to Cambridge on a course that would teach me to make  a violin myself. I’m hoping to learn enough to put it in a novel.

I’ve been doing it for a few months now, on one afternoon a week. At this rate, other people on my course tell me, it will take about two years to make an instrument I can play. So far it’s just a half-finished scroll, a set of ribs glued round a mould (the mould is of a 1715 Stradivarius), and a roughly shaped back and front. But I don’t think I’ve concentrated so completely on anything for years.