I NOTE from the papers this week that yet another large company has announced that it will soon stop taking cheques. This follows in the footsteps of quite a number of concerns which have done the same. Soon, probably, no retailer will take cheques. I'm sure one of the varied reasons they give will be 'to improve the service we give to our customers' while doing no such thing. Eventually, I suspect, cheques will, so to speak, be bounced entirely. Banning cheques will reduce the ways a customer in shops can pay to three: debit card, credit card and cash. I suspect that cash may be next on the list. Already if you try to pay with a sizeable amount of cash they hold the notes up to the light and check them with some sort of pen while looking at you suspiciously as if you've just climbed out of your basement waving tenners in the air and hoping they are drying off nicely. There are several reasons why saying goodbye to cheques altogether would be bad news. One is that we will never, ever, again be able to say, truthfully or untruthfully, 'the cheque is in the post', the other is that while electronic payment is fine most of the time, it isn't when it doesn't work. I was in a supermarket the other day when the card machines all failed. I don't know if the firm's cash point also failed, but there was such a huge queue next to it that it would surely soon run out of cash. All around stood bewildered customers with trolleys full, realising that hubby wasn't going to get his tea that night because they had no means to pay but their cards. Except a few of us who also carry a cheque book, we sailed through somewhat smugly. I don't think I've ever been an envious person, except I do envy people who are musical. Because I'm not at all. I seem to come from a bunch of folk who had not a musical gene in their bodies. My mother told me from an early age, probably when I was still in a pushchair, that I was tone deaf, 'like everyone else in the family'. I didn't know what it meant, but I did learn that even in nursery school I should keep my little lips buttoned when others were happily singing away at 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' or 'Jesus Wants You For A Sunbeam'. My mother was quite happy to share the information that I was a bum singer, if there was ever a danger I might be asked to hold a tune. So I was the only child who never joined in 'Happy Birthday' at parties. My mother was very good at this sort of thing. I don't think she meant it unkindly, it was a sort of a need to protect me from unkindness in others. Take ears. I have biggish ears. All right, big ears. So from the time I was a toddler my mother, having tried the tight pixie bonnet suggestion from a women's magazine when I was a baby to no avail, always told people I had big sticky-out ears, pulling back my hair to emphasise this. When we went to the hairdresser she always made a great point of telling them not to cut too much off because I needed to have my ears hidden. Even when I had plaits she used to start plaiting below the ear lobes, so the plaits stuck out and I looked like one of the bit parts from Little Orphan Annie, the child nobody ever wanted to take home even though the orphanage was on a buy one get one free offer that week. It was the same with bottoms. People with large bottoms (ie) me, should never wear trousers, especially as they can't see themselves from behind, because if they could they wouldn't. So it was way into my teens that I ventured into a pair of jeans, to the horror of aforementioned mother who tried to force me to at least wear a Playtex girdle under them for decency's sake. And so it was with music. At my first school we didn't do much serious music, I think I was in the triangle section of a percussion band, but my senior school was different. We had a charismatic music teacher arrive who was convinced that every child was musical (he hadn't yet met me) and set about forming groups, a band and a choir. I was happily included in the latter and for a few weeks merrily sang along. It took him that long to realise what was wrong with his merry band of singers, because not only was I unable to sing in tune but I had the ability to make others sing out of tune. He obviously didn't want to hurt my feelings because he merely moved me to the back and told me to tone things down a bit. I got the message and just used to mouth the words. I never learned to dance either, because people who are tone deaf have no sense of rhythm either. Guess who told me that! Therefore a whole generation of music passed me by, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly and the like. I did listen to Cliff because my best friend had the hots for him and played Living Doll over and over again until she wore it out. I quite liked Elvis until he started to make musical films. I've never been able to stand any form of musical where people start singing for no reason at all, telling their loved ones in flowery notes how they adore them, then the action continues as if nothing had happened. I mean, if you started singing at the top of your voice in real life men in white coats would probably come and take you away. Then I went and married a Welshman who thought he could sing. Well, he was Welsh and everyone in Wales can sing. Can't they? Stand in a pub and all the customers neatly arrange themselves into voices and start in perfect harmony. I'll say no more, except there's always the odd one out! Naturally, my mother had confided my failings in the melodic department to my husband, so he was added to the chorus of 'shut ups' if I broke into any form of song. Having a non-musical mother and a would-be musical father probably wasn't very helpful to the children. They all tried various instruments, from the dreaded recorders to guitars to, for a few painful weeks, the violin. The latter, with its strangled cat sounds, was thankfully abandoned very quickly. It's not an instrument which is, in my opinion, entirely suitable for those at the beginning of a musical interest. I suppose I must have missed another generation of singers, in fact I can't remember any of them, except they all sounded the same. Except my son was into something called 'heavy metal' for a long time, music which didn't seem to exclude people who were tone deaf because it didn't have much of a tone anyway. Of course I did sing occasionally, usually when the wine had flowed freely, and I discovered that if the wine had been flowing freely into others they didn't either notice or care if the person belting out The Wild Rover was in or out of tune. I do remember one New Year's Eve, however, when I was singing happily along with Auld Lang Syne when a reasonably good looking man sidled up to me, leaned over and... well I was just about to fend him off when he said 'you've got the worst voice I've ever heard'. If that was his chat-up line I'm not surprised he was alone on New Year's Eve. My son, who has a huge collection of music of all kinds, although he's never ever tried to sing, has introduced me to a whole new world. When I asked him to send me some CDs to play in the car he was, he admits, thinking along the lines of 'the best of Val Doonican', but we got over that one with a few sharp words from me. Now we share at least some of his favourites, usually people nobody else has ever heard of, but they're nowhere near Val Doonican or even Des O'Conner. In fact we're even going to a concert. The first I've ever been to, well the first I've ever paid to go to. I used to get sent to concerts and things like that when I was a film and music critic. Why make someone who is tone deaf the music critic, you are asking? And well you may. I probably just didn't think of a quick enough excuse at the time. It didn't improve my music knowledge one bit, in fact I famously once asked some bloke called Larry Adler what he did. He was such a nice man that he wasn't in the least offended, and told me he played the harmonica a bit. So, it's taken a very long time, but at last I can at least appreciate some music, if not join in. I also read an article recently by somebody who was boasting that he could teach anyone to sing, anyone at all. I very much believe that he might have altered that to 'nearly' anyone if he had ever stood outside my bathroom door.
