Or as I initially wrote the Chello. It was Helena’s idea that she wanted to learn the cello, I was dubious as I wasn’t sure she knew what one was but then she knew how to spell cello before I did. We have been listening to classical music for a while – my music Education idea was to get a list of genres of music and start playing them in the background. We got to Classical and H didn’t want to go further as classical has no words and this is good. I did tell her I love Leonard Cohen’s hallelujah played by Cello.

I got nearly an hour long conversation tonight about the reasons why the cello is so awesome. She wants to learn to make others proud, she sees being proud and impressed. She is doing it to prove an adult friend wrong, they joked that it would be a challenge. She is also doing it because she genuinely seems to like it. Today she practiced for ages and got all excited about having made up her best tune yet – she’s playing open strings so the tune is all in the timing of the bow. She has been trying out bowing two strings at once. I learnt several musical instruments, none of which I was good at and none of which I persevered with. H can already bow a clear note and I remember this taking ages with the violin which I asked to learn. Was I as motivated as her at the beginning? Will her trip into learning an instrument be as ineffectual as mine? Does this matter? NO. Currently she likes it so I am enabling her and if she changes her mind I will enable that… We went to a cello and piano concert last night with a lot of older listeners. She loved it, didn’t read the book she brought, clapped so hard and told me that she wanted to be that good then told me some of her other observations on the cellists playing.

Later: H has discovered after an argument with me you can play angry music, jealous music and even sad music and you feel better.