For the last month or so I’ve had a wart on the tip of my left index finger. A wart! I’ve never had one before. I think I had associated them with ghastly mediaeval illustrations, or fairytales in which unpleasant things get inflicted by magic on evil-doers. Anyway, my wart has chosen a location particularly annoying  for someone who plays the piano. (It doesn’t bear thinking about how painful it would be to play a stringed instrument with a wart on the left index fingertip).

Fortunately this has been a quiet period, concert-wise, but nevertheless I’ve had to practise for things coming up. I can play gently and slowly with my left hand, re-fingering as I go, but I can’t put any pressure on the sore finger, at least not without yelping and snatching my hand away from the keyboard in fright. I now have some medication for it, so with luck it will be better by the time I next have to play in public. But honestly! What a stupid little problem for a pianist.

At the weekend, several newspapers carried photos of thieves in China using chopsticks to pick people’s pockets as they browsed market stalls. The chopsticks are used essentially to make the thief’s fingers much longer and thinner – a sort of variant on the Edward Scissorhands look. It also means that the pickpockets don’t have to stand quite so close to their victims.

We were discussing how useful it would be to learn how to use chopsticks to extend the reach of one’s hand. A number of potential uses, some more bizarre than others, were mentioned. We considered their use in piano playing; after all, there’s already a well-known beginner’s piano piece called Chopsticks. ‘Perhaps you could use chopsticks to stretch those big intervals in Chopin that you always say you can’t stretch with your small hand’, suggested Bob. After a pause, he said, ‘Chopinsticks’.

I’ve been in Italy for a few days. One evening I went to a concert in the courtyard of a lovely historic building in Bologna. The Italians are so lucky to have so many of these theatrical spaces and the climate which makes it possible to sit there, in the balmy air, late into the evening without even a light jacket.

Whenever I go to an instrumental concert in Italy, however, I’m puzzled by the audience’s indifferent response to the performers. They seem to applaud with the same polite warmth whether the performance is good or not. An outburst of virtuosity is received in exctly the same way as something very ordinary. Listening to the clapping with a musician’s ear, I can tell that it isn’t thoroughly engaged – as though the charm of the setting, the melodies floating into the velvet blue of the sky, and the lights on the golden stonework have lulled the audience into a pleasant state of dreamy half-attention. As a performer myself I’ve found this frustrating, especially when I know how worked up an Italian audience can get in the opera house, cheering and booing with fervent participation. Perhaps purely instrumental music has never meant as much to them?

A friend was telling me about a piano recital he attended last year in the Wigmore Hall. During a Beethoven sonata, members of the audience were distracted by a low buzzing noise emanating from somewhere in the room, and judging by the pianist’s increasingly cross glances in the direction of the stalls, he was conscious of it too. The noise went on and on and people started to get restless. In a break between pieces, while the pianist was offstage, a young man in the audience suddenly sprung to his feet and, pointing at an elderly lady sitting near him, he declaimed, ‘It’s her!’

As my friend said, it was like the moment of denunciation in an Agatha Christie thriller.  The lady looked up aghast. ‘Me? What do you mean?’ ‘The buzzing noise!’ ‘What buzzing noise?’ ‘The buzzing noise that is coming from your bag!’ Other people nearby joined in: ‘Yes, there’s a buzzing noise coming from your bag!’ The lady looked down at her bag in consternation. Evidently she hadn’t heard anything herself. She fumbled in her bag and produced an electric pepper-grinder which, it turned out, she had just bought that afternoon. Somehow it had got switched on, and had been grinding pepper remorselessly throughout the Beethoven.

After we had finished laughing, we discussed whether the pepper grinder could be pressed into service by the Examining Boards as a challenge to be met by students taking performance diplomas. ‘The candidate must be able to hold their concentration while an electric pepper grinder is turned on and operated for a portion of the performance.’

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.’