A dream of mine is for a pop up choir to, well, pop up when I’m at a train station. I love singing, I love hearing singing and I love, love, love those videos when a large space just fills with the sound of crescendoing voices, and foot tapping and swaying, and smiles and gasps ripple from singer to audience and back again.
I’m still waiting.
However! Something popped up in the Family WhatsApp which took me back to a warm day at the end of 2022 which came close, and could have come closer.
I’m speeding into my mainline train station and flying towards the ticket barriers as is my wont, except on this day I reverse up. Leeds station is busy, buzzing with activity, and a small, horseshoe-shaped crowd is forming on the concourse. The attraction? There were two.
The first is a flawless, polished, velvety-black piano. Wow. I mean, the piano at St Pancras never fails to warm my heart, not least because I always seem to pass when somebody Really Good is playing it. It’s a thing of beauty in its own right – traditional upright, a bit bashed, telling its own story – but a patch on this piano in Leeds it is not.
Goodness, I think, giddy with it. We are getting a piano at Leeds station and not only a piano, but one of this calibre?!
Phew, I thought Leeds Council were skint.
Northern Trains, surely not? I’m a huge train traveller, my go-to method of transport, and I’m sympathetic to the pressures underfunded train services are under, but there’s nothing about a northern train that hints at a wealthy company gifting pianos to one of their much used stations. One of Northern train’s recent accolades was to be the most unreliable trainline in the country. No comment, says this frequent Northern Rail user.
And I can’t see Leeds Station, with its fairly recent make-over, forking out for the kind of piano that Elton John might procure.
I can only assume our station has a rich benefactor and hallelujah to that. I actually think that a piano at every train station of a decent size would be a great investment. I think society is poorer for not investing in the power of a smile, the knock-on effect for the smiling person and the smile receiver as we go about our day, head in other stuff. The power to lift anyone’s mood should be valued more. But that’s for another day.
The second of the two attractions that has the attention of the ever-increasing crowd is no other than Claudia Winkleman, hopping up and down as you’d expect, chatting with camera crew and other official souls with ID strung around their necks.
I still think this is the opening ceremony for the establishment of a piano for all to use at Leeds Station and I’m rather chuffed that our station In The North has the inimitable Claudia to cut the ribbon.
Naïve? Qui moi?
Despite the excitement, and the frisson of anticipation in the crowd, there are a lot of power cables being moved around and installed, but not much else is currently happening and I’m conscious that I’m supposedly on my way home to work.
I let my local train go.
A guy wanders nonchalantly over to play the piano. The crowd sinks into silence. He’s all ‘tatted-up’ with huge earrings and (great) leather jacket, hunched over the keyboard. Not your stereotype classical pianist.
He’ll be brilliant, I think.
And he is. So gorgeously understated. How wonderful he’s just passing through the station, I think, and yet he plays the piano like an angel. There are so many talented people around we know nothing about.
He jumps up when he’s finished as if he’s just been called for tea, and Claudia has to run after him to drag him back from the exit doors, as she needs an interview with him. That raised a giggle!
I hear another person play. Beautiful, again. So talented, so nimble fingered, so utterly calm and composed. I’m transfixed not only by the music but by the ability to block out everything and everyone and play as if the music is just seeping out through her fingers with as much effort and nerves as if she’s cleaning her teeth. She finishes to huge applause, the crowd has doubled in size by now, and she’s ready to speak to Claudia.
The clock is ticking, though. The next train is calling me. I really do need to work and I haven’t factored in an impromptu afternoon off and hey, this is just the start. We have a piano at Leeds station; I’ll be here again.
I head off, happy to have had that unexpected experience, wondering how tall, or rather, small Claudia is. She could be even shorter than me!*
And that was about the long and the short of it until the next time I was at the station and noticed… the space.
Reader, the piano has gone.
I was gutted. That piano! All that razzamatazz! How could ‘they’ justify spending all that money to install a piano in the station concourse, only to take it away again? Were they playing with us?
I didn’t get my answer until a good few months later.
Everyone is talking about a girl with no sight playing a piano at a train station.
Have I seen the link? They ask. Listen to her play, she will blow your mind.
I do listen. Mind blown. I learn she’s the winner of The Piano, a competition I’m the last to hear of, and gosh, what a life-affirming, sensory overload experience watching and listening to her is. Wait, I say, now flicking through other YouTube clips of this very young pianist and other equally talented piano players, isn’t that—?
It’s Leeds Station. It is not unusual for me to be the last to know. I was at the filming of the second ever episode of The Piano. But I didn’t stay. I missed her. I missed Lucy. I missed the winner, the winner of the first ever series of The Piano, staged at Leeds Station. It was a Sliding Doors Moment. That clock you can’t turn back. Sigh.
Roll forward a couple of years to this week’s WhatsApp ping. One of my sisters has been living in America for way too many years for my liking, but she’s back over in the UK now and catching up on a bit of British Telly. Unbeknown to me, said sister’s been trawling through the Leeds episode of The Piano to find me (gotta love family!) and this is what she sends
Yep, that’s me, in deep concentration, watching something extraordinary going on, not a clue what it is beyond the shiny piano. Caught on Camera. There at the start. I may have missed the main event, not had a skooby doo, but folks, I was there. I have the evidence to prove it!
Next time, I will stay.
Have you ever found yourself in the middle of something great, no idea what it was or what you are doing there? Or perhaps you took a different turn and had a huge Sliding Doors Moment? I love those, too. Please do share 👇🏻
So envious you stumbled across The Piano!
Such a shame that you didn’t stay but the story is brilliant 🤩 x