If I was Tony Blair's adviser, I'd tell him to take up the piano. What someone in his aloof position needs is swiftly bringing down to size, which is what happened to me last week when I attempted my grade one piano exam. Nothing has reduced me to a gibbering bag of nerves more than the 10 minutes I spent trying to play the piano in front of an examiner without making it sound like a Roman execution. I've never felt less like a grown-up in my life, and that includes that part of my life when I was a child.
I've made speeches, bought a house, been asked to write for a national newspaper and driven a car into things, but none of this adult experience mattered when I walked into a strange room, sat down at a strange piano and played what in the end turned out to be completely strange music.
The reason the music was strange was because, for some reason, my hands had been suddenly replaced by two packets of fish fingers, neither of which could be controlled by signals from the brain. Sounds came out that have never been categorised before. Imagine the noise an emperor penguin would make if it fell into a piano. Then treble it. Now have the whole thing detonated in a controlled explosion. That's still not as bad as the sound I was making. A Shetland pony could have played better.
At the end of perhaps the longest 10 minutes of my life, during which I decided I hated all instruments and all music, I did make a salutary discovery. Which is that all of us, especially those of us who have a particularly high regard for ourselves (for example, Tony Blair), would benefit from being thrown into a short, relatively trivial but deeply embarrassing situation over which we have no control and throughout which we are mercilessly judged.
Armando Ianucci in The Observer Sunday 26th March 2006