My favourite celebration is Easter, for many reasons, but hot cross buns are an important feature.
Even your most basic hot cross bun is delicious, but those bougie ones from Sainsbury’s with the red currants and lingonberries??? Absolutely divine. You have to slice them in half, toast them very precisely (two to three minutes I’d say) so that they are warmed through and the outermost edges are crispy, and then you have to slather on the butter. (BUTTER, not margarine. Although you shouldn’t be eating margarine with anything in my humble opinion – affordable butter for all, comrades!)
Just thinking about those golden pools of melted butter nestled in half a hot cross bun makes my mouth water. I feel so excited I begin mentally singing, “Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, one-a-penny, two-a-penny, hot cross buns!” like some street urchin in a Dickens novel. Then I am always forced to remember that I used to play the violin, and I hear the awful hee-hawing of my amateur bow-work as I played ‘Hot Cross Buns’ in my violin lessons. *shudders*
My dad will occasionally remind me that he wishes I hadn’t given up on the violin, but it is an intimidating instrument that sounds unbearable when played with anything less than the skill of a professional orchestral musician. And anyway, I didn’t give up the violin, the violin gave up me!
For the children whose parents couldn’t afford to buy their own instrument, my secondary school would loan you one of theirs. Somehow – somehow (*knowing look*) – I got loaned the worst violin of the bunch. My instrument had a large patch on the front where a hole had been and whoever had repaired the violin with whatever material that was used to repair it had not bothered to try and disguise the disfigurement. It was ugly and it did not inspire devotion in a thirteen year old.
Anyway, one day I left school with my violin in hand and when I got home it was not there. Worse still, I didn’t realise it was missing until the next day. How you can leave something like a violin somewhere and not realise is still beyond me. It was a very nerdy and cumbersome accessory to take on my 1.5 hour trip (each way) to and from school – another reason why I hated music lesson days.
My parents wrote a note to my music teacher offering to cover the cost. I remember him reading it, looking up at ceiling and saying, “Er, £50 will cover it!” I doubt it was worth even that much. My parents didn’t pay and between them, my music teacher and myself, no one mentioned violins or music lessons ever again. Until my dad started expressing his regrets.
But I was quietly relieved when I lost that ugly violin, we really didn’t like each other. All it gave me was calloused fingertips and an excuse to miss 30 minutes of class a week, and all I did was prolong its joyless life. I still don’t understand how you can lose a violin, though, so I’m convinced it ran away from me. And good riddance.