The Twelve Days of Christmas: 11

On the elev­enth day of Christ­mas, my true love gave to me: eleven pipers piping.

I had always sup­por­ted my true love’s cre­at­ive endeav­ours, no mat­ter how fool­hardy they seemed. I watched — with my fin­gers cov­er­ing my eyes, nat­ur­ally — as my true love dis­covered a pas­sion for bun­gee jump­ing; fire-eating proved to be only a tem­por­ary diver­sion after it played havoc with the smoke alarms in our flat; and stock car racing seemed like so much bois­ter­ous fun, until my true love decided to try out some new driv­ing moves in the super­mar­ket car park whilst at the wheel of our mod­est two-door hatchback.

Mean­while, I had taken up water­col­our paint­ing and Buddhist med­it­a­tion, des­pite hav­ing abso­lutely no artistic tal­ent for the former and dis­tinctly lack­ing in con­cen­tra­tion when it came to the lat­ter. As my true love researched yet another dan­ger­ous pas­time, I couldn’t help won­der­ing if people were right when they said we had noth­ing in common.

“Have you ever thought of …” — my ques­tion trailed off as I des­per­ately tried to think of a suit­ably sed­ate hobby — “… garden­ing? Have you ever con­sidered tak­ing up garden­ing? Ima­gine what we could do with our unin­spir­ing lawn if we bor­rowed a few garden­ing books from the lib­rary, and maybe picked up some ideas from that Alan Titch­marsh pro­gramme on BBC2. What do you think?”

My true love didn’t even look up from the intro­duct­ory mem­ber­ship pack for the local Deep Sea Diving & Ship­wreck Explor­a­tion Soci­ety, but the mumbled response soun­ded less than enthu­si­astic. I didn’t pur­sue it because, if I’m hon­est, I loathe gardening.

“Wine-tasting?”

Without utter­ing a word, my true love poin­ted a fin­ger at the dis­gust­ingly cheap bottle of Bul­garian lighter fluid, mas­quer­ad­ing as white wine, that stood half-consumed on the cof­fee table. It’s true, we weren’t exactly con­nois­seurs of the finest vintages.

“What about learn­ing a musical instrument?”

Finally, I had a response. My true love looked over at me, thoughtfully.

“I could teach you to play the gui­tar,” I said, unable to dis­guise the eager tone in my voice.

“Hmm, maybe. I’ll think about it — but right now I really must call up to book a place on that week­end course in SAS sur­vival techniques.”

To be fair, over the next few days my true love did at least attempt to make an effort. I patiently demon­strated a few rudi­ment­ary gui­tar chords, and after a week of les­sons the nervous strum­ming was begin­ning to sound a little more like Hey Jude. But not much. My true love’s lack of enthu­si­asm was palpable.

The fol­low­ing Sunday morn­ing, my peace­ful slum­ber was rudely shattered by a sud­den unearthly screech­ing, dron­ing and wail­ing com­ing from the garden. Either the neighbourhood’s entire cat pop­u­la­tion was being murdered in cold blood, or a choir of troubled ban­shees were indul­ging in some vocal gym­nastics. Stag­ger­ing to the win­dow and part­ing the cur­tains, I was con­fron­ted by the sight of ten bag­pipe play­ers. Stand­ing in the centre of the group, and puff­ing away for dear life, was the elev­enth piper and new­est recruit — my true love.

Dumb­foun­ded, all I could do was watch — win­cing with pain as the cat­er­waul­ing shook the fillings in my teeth — until the noise ceased.

“Isn’t this great?” shouted my true love, spy­ing me in the win­dow and blow­ing me a kiss. “You were so right about learn­ing a musical instru­ment! The local pipers’ band have said I can join, and in return I’ve offered them reg­u­lar rehearsal space in our garden.”

So my true love and I finally have a shared pas­time — music. Our duets are rather lim­ited, since there aren’t many pieces for acous­tic gui­tar and bag­pipes except Mull of Kintyre, which is becom­ing a little repet­it­ive now that we’ve prac­ticed it seventy-five times. And yes, it’s true that I’ve taken to wear­ing earplugs dur­ing the pipe band’s prac­tice ses­sions. But once my true love’s play­ing tech­nique has improved, it will be won­der­ful to be gently woken each morn­ing by the sound of a piper’s High­land lament com­ing from the kit­chen. Really, it will.

My true love doesn’t believe in doing any­thing by halves.

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