I practise the piano in a room at the front of the house. People walk past in the street all the time, and I’ve always been amazed at how few of them turn their heads in the direction of the sound, or appear to notice it at all.

I mentioned this recently to a concert pianist colleague and his wife. ‘Talk about not noticing it at all!’ they burst out. ‘A little while ago, we had to move a grand piano into an upstairs room, using a crane. The crane was in the street, with the grand piano swinging in a harness above the pavement, and people were walking underneath, not even looking up!’ We discussed this kind of behaviour and concluded that either it is a proof of the curious anonymity of London life, or else the passers-by are all like Lane, the butler in Oscar Wilde’s ‘Importance of Being Earnest’. Lane is laying the table for afternoon tea while Algernon is playing the piano in an adjoining room. The piano playing ceases and Algernon enters. ‘Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?’ Lane: ‘I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.’

A thoughtful letter today from a reader about recordings. He’s noticed that musicians often say they dislike the manicured, edited-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives recordings of today, and prefer the more ‘natural’, warts-and-all approach of the earlier twentieth century, when it wasn’t possible to correct or ‘improve’ things afterwards. Record collectors, too, often cherish these less self-conscious recordings. My correspondent asks innocently why, if musicians dislike today’s glossy finished product, they submit to being edited like that?

It’s a vexed question to which there don’t seem to be any answers, only more questions. Why has bland perfection become such an ideal in every field? It’s the taste of our time. Photos are routinely air-brushed, celebrities’ figures digitally altered to make them taller and slimmer. Public figures have makeovers to weed out their idiosyncrasies. Speech impediments are treated; erratic teeth are straightened. Magazines promote the identically fabulous lifestyles of the wealthy. We know there are often other realities behind the images, but that hasn’t quenched our thirst for airbrushed glamour. It’s the same in the music world.

You might counter that there is now a healthy vogue for ‘live concert recordings’, but even that can be a bit of a fiction. Yes, the concert is used as the basis for the finished product, but the rehearsals are often recorded and used as material for ‘patching’ mistakes. Sometimes the players also stay behind after the concert to ‘do corrections’. Many ‘live’ labels should really be called ‘based on a live performance’ or ‘lightly edited’. Otherwise, it’s just perpetuating the myth that perfection is routine.

During lunch in a tiny village in the forests of Le Sidobre, in Languedoc, we got into conversation with an elderly lady who told us that she spoke Occitan as a child, before she was required to learn French. At our request, she spoke some Occitan to us, the only time I’ve ever heard it spoken. It was lovely and sounded rather like Spanish.

After lunch, we went to see some of the extraordinary rock formations of the Sidobre forests, which are littered with vast ancient boulders. Some of them, by accidents of nature, have landed in amazing places, balanced so improbably that your heart is in your mouth as you walk underneath. The rock in the photo has the Occitan name of Peyro Clabado, or ‘stuck rock’, referring to the huge rock on top wedged incredibly on its base by a little rock supplied thousands of years ago by Chance. It looked like a gigantic Henry Moore sculpture. And so did many of the other boulders on the forest floor. It seemed to us that the locals had missed a trick in not naming more of them. Everyone was beating a path to the famous rocks, such as ‘The Goose’ or ‘The Three Cheeses’, but we saw plenty of unvisited rocks equally deserving of nicknames. The Whale, The Hot Cross Bun, The Sea Lion, The Mushroom. Did I say they looked like Henry Moores? Maybe it was more that I saw the origins of his sculptures in these shapely old boulders.

An exhibition of artistic sculptures based on pink garlic – how could I resist when I saw the poster outside the tourist office in Lautrec? Pink garlic is a local speciality, but despite its undoubted charms it didn’t seem a promising material for sculpture. I imagined tiny netsuke figures whittled from cloves of garlic, but the reality was almost more surprising: whole heads or cloves of pink garlic and the white strawy garlic stalks were used as the raw material for tableaux of various kinds.

A mediaeval timbered house was composed of garlic bulbs and stalks, with pink cloves for roof tiles. An aeroplane made of garlic stalks had pink-clove-shaped passengers peeping out of the windows. A deep sea scene featured fish and crustaceans of garlic. In my favourite tableau, a rugby stadium had been recreated. The base of garlic cloves were the floodlights, garlic stalks were the goalposts, and the stadium terraces were packed with fat pink garlic cloves, looking surprisingly plausible as sports fans. My favourite thing about the exhibition was that visitors went round in respectful silence and with completely straight faces, as though there were nothing in the least amusing about an octopus made of garlic.

The region seemed to lack its local Damien Hirst. Nobody had thought to slice a garlic clove vertically and to display its cruelly separated halves suspended in a tank of formaldehyde.

The Ambialet piano course ended last night with concerts by the participants (see some of them in the photo). It never ceases to amaze me how people manage to raise their game in these circumstances, even though most of them find it a nerve-racking experience and dread it beforehand. Every single person played the best they had played all week. Although I had only been teaching them for a week, I nevertheless felt proud of them and basked in their pleasure afterwards.

I was tired and didn’t make it much past midnight, but some of the participants stayed up longer, chatting in the courtyard by the bar. In the middle of the night I awoke to hear the distant strains of ‘God Save the Queen’, sung by an impromptu choir of pianists, floating on the night air. It was pleasingly like that moment at the end of Debussy’s piano prelude ‘Feux d’Artifice’, when the music dies away and you hear fragments of La Marseillaise, marked ‘distantly’.