When I was at Wymondham High, a group of friends and I formed a quartet group and started busking in the street. It was a fun little time; we made a decent amount of money and got some nice compliments from the crowds. We even played at a couple’s wedding once.

I’ve been in the (amateur) music game for most of my life. I have been lucky enough to work with multiple amazing teachers. I have played several concerts with both Norfolk and Edinburgh-based groups, including two student operas and a film music concert featuring pieces by Hans Zimmer, John Williams, John Barry, and more, which included me playing the iconic solo at the start of Pirates of the Caribbean.

Which made what happened recently all the more embarrassing.

I was at a rehearsal for an upcoming project, and as usual, you glance over it in advance and identify any particularly tricky passages. I identified one line of odd-looking treble clef and thought, “eh, just one nasty part – no problem. We’ll be grand.”

I turn up, and there’s always that first five minutes of a rehearsal where you haven’t quite warmed up, so the sound quality is a bit off. It didn’t help that that was the exact moment I had to play a solo – but I went through it anyway. “Eh. These things happen. At least I hit the notes. The sound will improve as we go.”

An hour later, I felt unemployable and considered resigning from the instrument entirely. I played F sharps in the naturals and F naturals in the sharps, zoned out in the wrong places, and stuffed up basically any moment where it was me playing by myself. Not helped by the fact that I was trying to make a good impression on someone in the group I hadn’t worked with before, a guy who glanced at me with increasingly suspicious eyebrow-raises as the rehearsal went on.

I of course exaggerate. These types of rehearsals happen all the time, often in the lead-up to the concerts you enjoy the most. Like in general life, you have days when you’re useless, days when you’re unusually good, and the average ones. In reality, I am a decent but average cellist – I do not claim to be brilliant, but I can pull it out most of the time, and usually people ask me back to do these things again.

Nevertheless, I think we as a society should celebrate that you can still be good at something if you stuff it up. Case-in-point: one of my favourite singers ever, Idina Menzel. Menzel is responsible for the voice behind Elsa (Frozen) and was the original Elphaba in the first ever run of Wicked on Broadway. She has given us Defying Gravity, The Wizard and I, No Good Deed, Let It Go, Show Yourself, and Into the Unknown, among other iconic songs.

At midnight on New Year’s Day, 2014, she performed Let It Go outside in New York’s Times Square. It was a very cold night, an infamous disadvantage for singers. She aimed for the iconic high note at the end of the song (“let the storm rage oooooooon…”) and what actually came out was a hoarse, uncomfortable-sounding yell that was nowhere near the actual note. She finished the song as if nothing had gone wrong and called out “Happy New Year everybody!” like a total champ.

She is one of the most iconic Western music figures of all time, and royally stuffed it up in public. I love this story – it makes me like her so much more. She showed us all that stuffing things up is part of being iconic! We can apply that in all of our lives, even if we’re not Broadway-level singers. (Crucial point there – I am not comparing myself to Idina.) I took a – microcosmic – version of that lesson with me through language A-Levels, reminding myself that the occasional disastrous oral session didn’t mean that life was over. (And, ironically, I listened to a lot of Idina Menzel between exams. Her belt is very cathartic during stressful periods.)

So the message for this particular month – go out. Do stuff. Mess it up. Hold your head high. That is part of being iconic.