Paternal pride

It is a glorious moment in the life of any music-loving parent when your progeny develop their own fierce musical tastes, and start looking rather askance at yours. My case may be extreme, as my two children have had to put up with my music for years. As previously mentioned in these columns, my tinnitus makes it all but impossible for me to work in complete silence, and I have become accustomed to playing up to a dozen CDs a day to get anything done. As a result, daughter (12) and son (10) find other people’s houses eerily quiet, even if someone is digging up the road outside and a Boeing 747 is strafing the rooftops. Maybe surprisingly, exposure to unceasing pop music has not put them off it for life. Instead, they seem to have noticed that I like A Certain Sort Of Thing.

Like all of us, I believe my own taste to be unfeasibly wide-ranging and impossible to pin down in a single sentence. But as I was listening to the Silver Seas the other day (a magnificently tuneful US pop group of the old school, in that every song sounds like a top ten hit from between 1968 and 1981, and would never get near radio play today), my daughter rolled in, and I said, ‘Isn’t this great?’ And she said, ‘Sounds like all your other records, Daddy.’ She meant no harm: it was merely a statement of fact, always the child’s most potent weapon. I put on some Abba and she was happy.

The most startling recent development chez Berkmann, however, has been the sudden blossoming of my son’s musical taste. Since babyhood he has always relished a tune, and often wanders into my workspace when something loud involving guitars is being played.