I´ve suggested you record yourself – for a lot of reasons.  One is that as you improve, your standards go up too – and since most people are their own harshest critics, you may continue to think you´re useless, can´t play for toffee, etc etc.  If you record yourself, you´ll have a baseline from which to measure your progress.
I haven´t mentioned listening back to your recordings!  This is the musical equivalent of putting away a piece of writing, and then looking at it a month, six months later – getting distance, perspective – and a pleasant surprise, perhaps.
It happened to me, when I was searching for a recording of me playing the theme, on trumpet, of Thad Jones´ “A Child is Born”.  I couldn´t at first find it anywhere – but I did turn up a recording of me playing it on the piano, which I´d completely forgotten about: so here it is, to celebrate the best thing that happened to me in 2015, becoming a granny.  And, whether you believe in Christmas or you´d rather put the x into xmas, it comes with my deepest wishes that your creative dreams, and mine, see the light of day in 2016.

I´ve always been far better at supporting other people´s creative efforts than standing up for my own.  My timidity in this has garnered me so much support from musicians over the years, that I´ve backed myself into a corner, and there´s no way out but leaping into the light – after all, you deserve to know if the person writing this book can play at all herself.
Well, I always said there´s two kinds of inspiration…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrfVqFV1wWqDZLd6jyXeHLV36GYL0AWQb

Wanted to share with you a few samples of the gifted musicians, singers, and composers who I have the great luck to be able to hear live quite frequently, here in this city! Enjoy!

Completing a first draft led me to neglect my blog.  But it turns out that flow feeds in in multiple ways.

This week it´s been  great to have a new student.  Combining piano, and English (I´m here in Spain, where learning English  is more of a psychological trauma than a language).  Apart from the pleasure of getting to know someone new, (competent and busy engineer with a family) it´s always good to be reminded of basic facts.  Like, no-one is an absolute beginner.  There´s always a desire to play, usually showing in childhood: and often a block – in this case, finding it hard to understand written music.  There´s a starting point – something he or she can already play, or would like to.  And lots of things to get right first off: how to sit well, how to hold yourself – ok guys, I didn´t mean that – and I´ve covered it in my book, and that´s reassuring for me.
It encourages me to hope that people will find it easy to access the resources in the audiobook in the same way as when I´m sitting next to them at the piano.  You remember a tune you picked out once?  Ok, let´s hear it.  What key is it in?  How can we identify this? Listen for the key note / construct the scale: or check out which scale has the same notes in in the scale table.  You want to play something to go with it in the left hand? Let´s see what chords naturally occur in that key.  How I´m longing to be able to bring out this audiobook as a multimedia experience where you can just click on links!  I´m battling to make it linear and sequential, when it really needs to be four dimensional!

In the late 60s, I had the privilege of getting to know Horace Ove, Britain´s pioneer black film maker, and Mary, and their children, tiny then, and hanging out at their house on Sundays, when they always had a load of friends round. It was my first experience of that kind of wonderful sociable hospitality. Horace had made a documentary about reggae, filming the first ever “Reggae sunsplash”, with Bob and marcia Griffiths singing “Young Gifted and Black”, the Maytals “Talking about that Big Monkey Man” – and I distinctly remember we were talking about how it didn´t look likely that reggae was going to catch on! 45 years on the music from one small island has conquered the globe.
Had just written the above when I got news of Horace´s 80th birthday celebrations – wish I could get there! Please, anyone near Crouch End go on my behalf!