Wymondham High students have just wrapped their yearly musical theatre production. This year, it was The Sound of Music. I’ve always been away at the time, so I’ve never been able to go, but by all accounts, it was a phenomenal show. It’s fantastic that Wymondham High have that yearly theatre tradition. What a great outlet for the students.

What made me feel very old, though, was the discovery through a friend that one of the Sound of Music stars was the child of one of my A-Level teachers. I remember when that teacher was pregnant. Now their child is at secondary school and performing onstage. Terrifying.

Wymondham High’s music and theatre department has always been a strong feature of the school. We were all very lucky to have it. From Year 7, I was in the orchestra as a cellist; the Head of Music back then was a man called Kitt Garner. I am still good friends with other pupils from that time. (I’m now 22 and about to graduate from university.)

Four of us from that orchestra then got together and went out busking as a quartet. It was a decent time; we made quite a tidy profit. Then a couple heard us on the street, came over and asked if we did weddings. We obviously hadn’t at all, but we gave them our card as suavely as possible (as if we were stone-cold professionals), and a year later, we were playing quartet arrangements of romantic pop songs at their wedding party.

They were a very sweet couple, and they did offer to give us publicity if we decided to grow the quartet and do more gigs. We didn’t take them up on it. We were all about to go to different universities, and an amicable but recent breakup within the group had made the loved-up atmosphere of the wedding concert a tad awkward.

But it still speaks volumes to the Wymondham music department’s ability to get people involved in stuff.

Recently, I had my last proper concert with my university orchestra. Most university concerts, even with proper classical repertoire, are not unduly challenging. You can pretty much get away with just attending the rehearsals and allowing the playing to get better slowly, without doing much at-home practice.

(My conductor doesn’t read this column.)

Not so this time – we were doing Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’. I’d never heard of it before, but assumed it would be standard classical music orchestra fare. Not that big a deal.

I was the leader of the cello section (a position based more on confidence than undue talent), and the first cello has some exposed solos in the Scheherazade. I cast an eye over them the night before the first rehearsal. Just to check if there would be any surprises (lol).

After about forty minutes of practice, I was considering resigning. The next morning, I made a pretty good show of it for first-rehearsal standards, but at the end, the conductor came up to me and said, ‘I have total faith in you’.

Which was code for, ‘you’re not there yet – for Christ’s sake, go and do some practice’.

Anyway, they got easier with time as they always do, and by the day, it was all looking pretty good. On I went, leading the cello section to another easy victory, I thought.

Then my strings went massively out-of-tune for the first time in years.

As a cellist, you can usually get away with tuning the strings via the adjusters, which are the easy, unthreatening tuning knobs at the bottom of the cello. This was not that time. It was a job for the black pegs at the top of the cello, which are terrifyingly notorious for snapping your strings if you turn them too hard.

(This is about 15 minutes before the concert started.)

By lucky providence, I pegged the strings back up to pitch without snapping them, and spent the rest of the pre-concert 15 minutes hoping and praying they wouldn’t go again during the solos. My desk partner – a very nice guy called Daniel with the looks of a young blonde Bond – said he’d give me his cello if that happened, which thankfully didn’t prove necessary.

And after the concerts were done, the conductor seemed happy. Phew.

Here’s to the Wymondham High music department – because that very probably would not have happened without them. And those who have done music know you get some of your best memories ever from it.