Piano in the Woods | Imaginary Advice Will Return

Hello friends. Ross Sutherland here. Um it is with heavy heart that I must inform you that this will be the last episode of Imaginary Advice for a little while. I'm going to be putting this feed on hold for a few months while I work on a couple of other creative projects. In the past I've always tried to juggle the production of this show with

other writing commitments I might have going on. But sometimes the numbers just don't add up and I have to put imaginary advice on hiatus for a little while. This'll actually be the third time in in ten years. I've had to put the show on hiatus every time the show has come back and I expect this time will be exactly the same. Although currently I can't tell you exactly how long that hiatus is going to last.

Once I have my return date, I will post a little update message to this RSS feed to keep you guys in the loop. If you currently support this show on Patreon, your monthly donation has now been frozen and I promise I will update you with plenty of notice before the show restarts and those payments unfreeze again. While I'm away, this feed isn't going to be I have plans to remaster and repository. some of my favorite older episodes of the podcast.

Last year I removed the first 50 episodes of the show from the RSS feed and uh my favorite episodes from that missing 50 are gonna get reworked. and reposted to this feed. I just want to polish up the recordings and bring them up to the current standard of production. Such as it is. So you're still gonna get some imaginary advice coming down the pipe from time to time. I promise. I've looked out a special story for the podcast episode today.

Something that feels like an appropriate coda to this most recent run of episodes. This story was originally broadcast on Radio 4's shortcuts programme. I owe some much. shortcuts. Shortcuts is pretty much the reason I started working in audio in the first place. And I'm so happy that I got to So many stories on that show over its 12-year run. And this was the last one that I got to write before the show was. uh sadly cancelled by the BBC in twenty twenty five.

And I I think the subject matter of this story i is fitting for an occasion like this, just as it felt appropriate as a way for me to say goodbye to shortcuts last year. Because it's not a story about endings. It's a it's a story about transitions. It's also a true story. Just so you know. I feel like I need to flag that whenever I do something in the first person on imaginary advice. Just because I've just fucked with you too many times, for you just to assume it.

So it's a true story. And let's get into it now. This is Piano in the Woods. Uh I hope you like it.

About six months before my granddad died, I remember going to visit him at the nursing home and realizing that he didn't know who I was. I was in my late twenties. The nursing home was close to my parents, but I lived far away at the time. I saw a lot less of him in those last few years. As a kid, I spent so many summers with my grandparents. My granddad and I went to the pictures together all the time. That was our thing, the movies.

Where not at the cinema, we'd take long walks together. Talking for hours. Or 14? In my head, I'm all those ages. I wish I could remember what we talked about on those walks, but sadly, that's long gone. All that remains now. Is um A feeling Could ask him anything. And Whatever his response. Those memories still feel so vivid. I search around for the next memory in the sequence, but nothing comes. And suddenly I'm all grown up, standing in the door of that nursing home.

He was In the main room by the window, sitting in his chair, along with some of the other residents, everyone in their chairs, half watching some movie on the TV. I didn't realise straight away that something had changed because of the way he looked at me. His eyes said that he knew me. He knew that he knew me. He just didn't know who I was, really.

As we spoke, it became clear that it wasn't just me that had disappeared. My granddad's entire conception of where he was and what he was doing there had shifted. The details emerged slowly, but as far as I could work out, my granddad now believed that he was on a ship. A cruise ship. An ocean liner. He and the other passengers were stretched out on their easy chairs, being waited on hand and foot.

You can see how one thing becomes the other, can't you? So much of his lived experience fits with that new reality. He also thought that he was back in the war. For somehow this cruise of his was happening in parallel to his military service in either the Sudan or Egypt. In this waking dream of his, he couldn't have been older than twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. My grandfather didn't have grandkids at twenty-seven, so of course I don't know. I can't exist. Oh the same thing. We do see.

know each other. I could tell that much from the way he looks at me. He keeps asking me about songs. Do I know this song? Do I know that song? And eventually it becomes clear who my grandfather thinks I am. He thinks I'm the pianist from the ship's house band. He asks me, how long my breaking? And I should say, at this point in my life, I had no experience with senility or But I am a soft touch, and I don't like So I just said oh you know. I'm not in any. As I was getting ready to leave.

My granddad started to become More serious. His voice dropped down to a whisper and he told me. That he wasn't just here. upon this ship to sunbathe and be waited upon. He had in fact been placed here. On a covert operation. He tells me that he has military orders to retrieve. A specific object. Something hidden on this ship that's going to help the Allied effort. He doesn't know exactly what the object is. Not yet, but He's close to working it out.

I remember him gripping my hand, leaning into me and saying, I think I've worked out what I'm supposed to be doing here. And I looked at him and I thought. I've lost him. This waking dream of his had overwhelmed our real shared past together. Our stories had drifted too far apart from each other, beyond any point of return.

Recently, I've been listening to these recordings of improvised piano. The piano was left in a wood in Canterbury. for an entire year. Every month the artist returned. to record a new piece of improvised music. Wettest winter in the UK. began, and you can certainly hear this. Together. I say together because you have to hear these improvisations as pieces of collaboration. The weather speaking through the piano. The improviser. Responding in turn. Keys jammed quickly, swollen with

New ways had to be found to manipulate the strings inside. They were yanked with cables, rubbed with tuning forks and milk frothing whisks. With each visit to the piano, the rules of collaboration changed. The sound of the music. Changed. The song. It took years to I don't know how many. Yeah. I started to understand what had really happened to me and my grandfather that day in the nursing home. Years for me to... Music playing beneath our conversation. But I think I hear it now.

The man I met that day didn't have a grandson. Nevertheless, whoever I was to him was He still trusted me enough to tell me the details of his top secret military mission. And there is still And that's I mean Divulging military intelligence to a civilian is Court-martialed for that. That's a serious offence. But somehow. Whatever he said to me, he knew I would treat it seriously. He could talk to me as an equal. Implicitly, he knew that I was on his side.

Perhaps I've thought about this memory too much myself. And perhaps my version of the past has been a good idea. But I can see Picture myself sitting there. Smiling. And though we didn't have a little bit of a little bit of a Deep down. When my break was over. And I went back to work. If there was a song he wanted to hear, If he could Try my best. To play it for him.

So, I think that's a good thing. That story was written by me. It was produced by Eleanor McDowell for Falling Tree Productions. And it was originally broadcast on Radio 4's shortcut. RIP. The music you heard was created by improviser, artist and curator Sam Bailey. To find out more about this project, go to Yeahs dot com. Finally, thank you to everyone who listened to this podcast.

over the last few years. Uh if you ever donated money to the show and helped me keep it going, uh I I am incredibly grateful. Thank you so much. My life in the last five years pretty much went from uh pandemic to um my wife and I going through IVF to us eventually having a child and making imaginary advice has been an an incredible lifeline for me throughout this period of time. Having this podcast Even a badly paid job. But still, I think it is a job.

And me being able to use it to pay the bills without having to be away from my family and being able to choose whatever crazy weird hours I need to make it fit within my schedule. I feel so incredibly fortunate that I got to do that. Because I have no idea what other writing work I could have possibly held on to throughout this uh extremely chaotic period of my life. So um thank Anyway. I'll be back soon. All this time. You have been listening to imaginary advice.