Mrs Davison, who lives near the bridge, is the retired head of Top Score, the music publishers. An example of their merchandise lies open on my piano stand at the moment. The set to which it belongs is a follow-up to their famous 1983-87 offering, It’s Actually Really Difficult to Play the Classics, and features luminaries such as J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Dvořák, Handel, Mozart, Prokofiev, Schubert and Shostakovich; Khachaturian and Rachmaninoff are ‘coming soon’. The artist in question here is the less widely known English pianist Peter Plinker.

The booklet’s title is You Can’t Play Plinker Either, and its subtitle Fail to Learn to Play the Hard Way. The level of the pieces is Grade 19: Practically Impossible, the penultimate in the You Can’t Play... series, one step below Grade 20: For Those Born With an Excessive Complement of Fingers.

Over two million people have bought one of Mrs Davison’s former company’s products (or, rather, two million copies of them have been sold). One reason the range is so popular is that each score comes with a CD-ROM, which includes performances of its works, as well as others, by the same composer, or by someone else. The ones in the latter category are always connected to those in the booklet, possibly through lines of influence, or maybe by theme, or perhaps in some other manner. The multimedia product also features a biography of the musician. Plinker’s reads: