What did you want to be?

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Some kids grow up wanting to be a fireman or an astronaut. I wanted to be a bagpipe. One of my brothers wanted to be a sheep so maybe there was something in the water. At least my ambition was (almost) musical.My earliest exposure to making music was on an Hammond keyboard at my grandparents’ house. I couldn’t read music (still can’t) but I would tinker for hours on this keyboard, picking out well-known tunes and creating new ones. I’m sure it was this early exposure to an instrument that gave me an understating of pitch and melody. Even now, if I’m struggling to sing a tricky phrase, I need to see the notes on a keyboard to understand how they relate to one another.If I wasn’t playing the theme to Bagpuss at my nanna’s, I was at home cataloguing my stamp collection and dreaming about brass rubbings. Do we change much as we grow up? I don’t think so. I’m just a bigger, more complicated version of my 10 year-old self. All the interests and fascinations were already there. I’d spend half my Saturdays in a local stationary shop wishing I could afford an electric pencil sharpener and wondering how long it would be before I could buy my first briefcase (I got it when I was 13 but didn’t have anything to put in it).So, in between ferrying your kids around from football practise, to the Guides and to dance class, make sure you find time for music, and specifically playtime with musical instruments. You might help spark a lifelong passion for the creative arts, which is probably better than wanting to be a bagpipe.