Why playing the saxophone depresses me...

...well - I exaggerate.  It doesn't depress me, but when I read that it takes 10,000 hours to master an instrument (or a sport, or whatever), I realise that I'll only be able to play it the way I really want to when I'm about 150.  Now, I can keep taking the cod liver oil and riding my bike (the wonderfully nerdy Brompton that I'm embarrassingly passionate about), but I don't think that's going to get me beyond about 90 max. 

In a good week, I reckon to practise for about 3 hours.  I keep pushing back my next lesson because I haven't quite got to the standard I want to demonstrate to my teacher - the wonderful Evelyn Harrison in Shoreham (a genius teacher - and player of the sax and clarinet). 

But of course the problem for so many brilliant musicians and sportsmen is that they spend so much of their lives practising that they miss out on so much else.  It's no wonder that a Tiger Woods or a John Lill develop socially dysfunctional behaviour, when they isolate themselves from the rest of the world for so much of their lives in order to practise. 

I'm going for balance.  If I sound a bit sharp now and again - or can't quite show the versatility of a Courtney Pine when I'm running up those scales - then you'll just have remember that I'm saving some of those hours to learn how to be even nicer to you.