Go Tell Aunt Nancy

I taught my first piano lesson in about 13 years on Saturday morning. When I was a kid, I took recorder and piano lessons all the way through secondary school, and my recorder teacher, who was excellent, started to get more requests for lessons than she had time to give, so she asked if I wanted to teach some of the newbies. I did it for about 4 years altogether, from the age of about 14 to 18, and by the time I came to doing my A-levels I had quite a few pupils, learning recorder and piano - kids who were on the waiting list for my teacher, plus kids from the village, etc. I only gave lessons between 4pm and 5.30pm (after school and before meal time), but I did it most days after school and my earnings ended up paying for two trips to the USA, so I didn't do too badly out of it.

Then I went to university and all my pupils went to different teachers. Between then and last November, I didn't have a piano to be able to teach (it's still required for non-piano lessons), but I was asked recently to take on a relative newbie because her teacher is struggling so much with morning sickness that she had had to postpone all her morning teaching until she's past the sicky stage of her pregnancy.

So I have a temporary pupil. We're only at the very beginnings of learning to play the piano - thumb on middle C, fingers on the next four notes - and it's her first musical instrument so not only do I have to teach the piano, I also have to teach the basics of music, so there's lots of talk of treble and bass clefs, beats in the bar, minims and crotchets etc. But so far so good.

And the going rate for a half-hour lesson has almost doubled since I last did any teaching :).