THE COLD SNAP

While my colleagues are busy rehearsing Strauss with Sir Charles Mackerras today, I am painting my nails. Why? Well it’s this Siberian weather we have all been enduring - I’ve broken my wrist.

How did I manage it? Extreme mountaineering in the Highlands? Skiing in Verbier? At least at a party in some aptly named killer heels? I wish. I was just walking down the pavement in Barnes. Theoretically, it doesn’t get more genteel than that. But of course I slipped on a patch of ice.

The following 9 hours in A&E were not very genteel, or gentle, either. Sitting out in the choked corridors while the heroic staff coped with the six-fold increase in accidents, my mother and I did our best to escape to another world, she reading aloud to me from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his walk to Constantinople in the 1930s. Nobody seemed to mind. And one manipulation, one re-setting, one general anaesthetic, 3 wires and 3 x-rays later, I’m sat in front of the fire, half way through the first part of the ordeal.

What I didn’t count, however, was the number of times in that hospital I whimpered to nurses, surgeons, consultants and anaesthetists, ‘I’m a violinist.’ Sometimes they responded with a nod, or ‘Right’ or ‘How nice’ while they carried on with their task. Making more chit chat, or perhaps filling out another form with my details, they would then say, ‘And do you work?’ ‘Yes. I’m a violinist.’ ‘What, a professional violinist? It’s your job?’ 'YES. IT’S MY JOB. IT’S MY LIFE. I’M A VIOLINIST. Please fix my wrist, and fix it well.'

Every musician fears injury. Mine, as they go, is a good one to have. Bones mend. Dancers and Doctors and Physiotherapists have told me it will be - eventually - as good as new. A lot of rehabilitation awaits me when I get out of plaster - perhaps 2 or 3 months. I will miss a lot of music in that time. The fact that I will miss recording the Strauss opera ‘Ariadne’ with my colleagues later this month caused a fresh rush of tears when it dawned on me, sitting in casualty. But Hospitals are a good place to remind yourself that things could be a lot worse.

And my hospital experience had it’s musical moments too. After my operation I was lying in bed and a volunteer appeared from the Hospital radio station, to ask me what song I would like to request. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony was my reply - the last movement. I didn’t insist on this occasion that it was the SCO’s recording. And although the nurses had tried Morphine, Co-Codamol and Tramadol on me, it wasn’t until I heard the Beethoven that the pain really went away.