PLINKY PLONKY PIANO PLAYING

Before my Grandma died, she requested two things for me to do at her funeral. First, she wanted me to play all the hymns during the service, and second, she wanted to go out to Scott Joplin's The Entertainer.

I only started playing the piano because of my Grandma. She had an upright piano in her living room and she herself would sit and play - especially when we were children. She had a style that was all her own: a sort of left-right, old-fashioned music-hall way of playing that she called Plinky Plonky. It was a very charming style - and she used it to great effect every time she was waiting for us all to get our coats on. She'd been ready for some time of course and while my Mum buttoned up our duffle coats, the happy sound of Why Are We Waiting* would come drifting melodiously out of the front room.

As time went by and I grew older, I started playing that old piano a bit myself - first with one-finger melodies and soon developing into chords, inversions and rhythmic patterns that were all my own. After a while, my Grandma would sit in her comfortable armchair and listen to me play, rather than playing herself. I later learned that listening to her grandson play was one of her greater joys towards the end.

So it was that she asked me to play her out. And I did. As the pallbearers shifted the coffin onto their shoulders and the congregation shuffled their handkerchiefs into their handbags and pockets, I sat at the piano and I played The Entertainer as well as I could muster. I think some people thought I was being massively disrespectful, but I didn't actually care at the time.

I was thinking about that today because this morning I played at another funeral - a very different occasion. Playing at funerals is tough - not just because of the solemnity of the moment, but also because you have to hold it together while facing everyone's grief. It's the opposite of playing at a wedding - there is no nervous groom bursting with love at the smiling bride who approaches him  - the privileged view from that occasion is replaced by serious men carrying a coffin. I felt my insides crumbling with sadness and hope, if such a thing were possible.

My biggest fear today was forgetting the words of the songs. It's somehow so easy to forget everything you know when lots of people are looking at you - at church it doesn't matter so much, but somehow when the occasion is more serious, you really feel like you have to get it right.

Thankfully, I covered up my mistakes expertly today and it went really well. The family were grateful anyway. While Paul read out the tributes and the handwritten eulogies, I shifted my focus from the row of black and white keys in front of me to the crowd of tear-stained faces that smiled affectionately to the tune of a thousand memories. Grief is so important, isn't it? It's such an opportunity to say thank you and goodbye and to remember that life is so precious, so wonderful, so treasurable and beautiful that we ought to cherish every single moment of it.

I do miss my Grandma, but I couldn't be more grateful for her plinky plonky piano playing and those moments of purest wonder that I never realised were so special.

I looked back from the mourners to the keys, rested my fingers in a D major second inversion ready for the closing hymn, and smiled gently to myself.

*If you're wondering, it's the same tune as O Come All Ye Faithful.