A Kentish Town music teacher reads about a Nottingham recording studio, Harry and Meghan’s visit and the gold stick nobody needed
Saturday, 17 October 2026. Kentish Town, a rented upright piano with three dead keys, a mug of builder’s tea, 10.05am.
The Saturday Morning Lesson That Became A Small Revolution
My first pupil on Saturdays is Ruby, who is fourteen, plays guitar with the furious concentration of a bomb disposal expert, and has spent the last six weeks writing a song called Everyone In Year Ten Is Fake. It is three chords, two of which she plays correctly, and it is the most honest piece of music I have heard all year. This morning she played me the bridge. It goes: you wear the same trainers but pretend that you chose them. I put my head on the piano lid and said nothing for a while.
The reason I was already emotional is that I had read, over toast, the report on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their visit to a Nottingham recording studio. They went to a community studio in St Ann’s, listened to a fourteen-year-old girl sing a song about peer pressure, applauded, hugged her in the recording booth and told her to keep singing. Nobody declared a bank holiday. Nobody produced a velvet cushion. A girl sang and adults paid attention.
The Best Line In The Whole Report
The report says the children received something rarer in British institutional life, which was the undivided attention of adults who seemed interested in what they were doing. I read that line to Ruby before the lesson. She looked at me as if I had read her a diagnosis. Then she said, that is literally all I want, and tuned her low E for four minutes without speaking.
I have taught music in this city for three years, since I was sixteen and started giving lessons to my neighbour’s kids for a fiver and a Twix. The thing I have learned is that most young people do not need fame or equipment or a special programme with a logo. They need one adult to sit still and listen to the whole song, including the bit where they get the chord wrong and say sorry, and then say, again, from the bridge.
A Gold Stick For The Music Room
The report also spends a glorious paragraph on the Gold Stick, the royal post whose job, as far as anyone can tell, is to carry a stick that is gold, with a silver one as backup. There is a line about how ceremonial stick makers might diversify into walking canes and curtain rods. I want one for the music room. I would use it as a conductor’s baton, but only for pupils who have practised. Unpractised pupils get the silver stick. It is the same stick. They do not need to know that.
I also want the article to be read out in every school assembly in the country, specifically the paragraph about how the charities appeared perfectly able to function before, during and after the royal visit. Music teachers, youth workers and volunteers keep things running every day in rooms that smell of radiator dust and old chewing gum. Nobody unveils a plaque. We just clear up the plectrums.
The Studio I Wish We Had
There is no community recording studio in Kentish Town that my pupils can use for free, though I have heard rumours of one in a youth centre in Somers Town that opens on alternate Wednesdays if a man called Jerome has the key. Instead, Ruby records her songs on her phone in the bathroom, because she says the tiles give it reverb. She is right. Some of the greatest records ever made were made in bathrooms. I believe at least one of them was by a Beatle. I may be making that up. Ruby says I am. Ruby is usually right.
What I Write About On Here
For anyone new to this diary, the satire.top home page collects my entries on music, teaching, London and the news that keeps barging into all three. I started it because my mum said I needed a hobby that was not crying at teenagers’ songs. It has become a hobby that is entirely writing about crying at teenagers’ songs. Mum says this is technically progress.
This week the news has been very loud, but the quiet stories are the ones that stay. A prince with three number plates is funny. A girl in Nottingham singing about peer pressure while the whole country stares at the coat of the woman listening to her is something else. It is what happens every week in thousands of tiny rooms, and nobody ever pools the press for it.
Ruby’s Homework
I have set Ruby homework. She has to finish the second verse of Everyone In Year Ten Is Fake, learn the F chord properly instead of pretending it is a different shape of F chord, and record the whole thing in her bathroom by next Saturday. I have told her that if she does all three, I will listen to the entire song without interrupting, including the bit where she gets the chord wrong.
She asked if she would get a hug in the recording booth. I said this is Kentish Town, not Nottingham, and we do not have a booth, but I would give her a Twix. She said that is basically the same thing. It is. It is exactly the same thing. That is the whole job.