Fond farewell

Melissa Kite lives a Real Life

The tuner who delivered the news could barely look me in the eye. After prodding at the keys of my piano for ten minutes he called me back from the kitchen where I had been making him a cup of tea. I knew the diagnosis was bad when he got up from the stool and walked towards me shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do.’

It seems that for some time now my piano has been suffering from a fatal fracture brought about by central heating. Other tuners have warned me. But I just didn’t think it would ever end like this. In a stark diagnosis of one desperate word: untunable.

I hadn’t really understood that a piano could die. Nobody ever warned me that they have a life expectancy. Not knowing the protocol for the situation, I fell back on the routine you go through at the vets. ‘Can we ease his suffering? Is it kinder to let him go now? How should I dispose of the body?’

The tuner shrugged his shoulders. There is no service for terminally ill pianos. Would not a kindly local nursery school take it in? Surely there was a themed honky-tonk bar in the West End that would be glad of it. He shook his head again. ‘I’m afraid you couldn’t possibly burden someone else with this.’

Short of finding a piano hospice there was nowhere I could take the poor instrument where it might live out the rest of its days in peace. And there is no piano undertaker service either. People who move pianos only move pianos they can make money from. I would have to take it to its final resting place myself.