Fret

One benefit of learning to play an instrument in your youth (and I am sure there are many, only I didn't want to turn this into something of a didactic essay, crammed with facts and statistics and line drawings to illustrate points not readily conveyed by words alone) is that, many years later, you can fondly revisit the pieces you struggled to learn as a child and find that you can actually play them now, and in fact they sound almost tasteful when executed with a reasonable degree of fluency, in contrast to the painfully halting performances of those early lessons. And you wonder why it only took 35 years to get to this level of proficiency.

I dug out the guitar this evening, and one of my earliest books of guitar music, which I must have bought as a young teenager. (Which may come as a surprise to people who know me, who suspect I somehow skipped my teenage years and went straight to middle age. But then when they see that the music consists of nineteenth century classical guitar classics, they may realise that their first impressions of me were probably correct.) And you remember what it was like to learn the pieces the first time, the ones you liked and the ones you hated; the occasional school concert; comments scribbled across the pages.