Stephen Fry, when I meet you, and I somehow sense that I will, I'm going to hug you, and we're going to share a sad little chuckle about how tragic it is that we cannot make music when we love it so much.

"These feelings were as nothing, are nothing, to what I felt and still feel about God's cruelty, God's malice, God's unforgivable cruelty in denying me the gift of music�Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy "music-making," all that grain of human performance, so much messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.

The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog's bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

AND I CAN'T FUCKING DO IT

I can't so much as hum "Three Blind Mice" without going off key. I can't stick to the rhythm of "Onward Christian Soldiers" without speeding up. I can't fucking do it.

Bollocks to Salieri and his precious, petulant whining. Maybe it is worse to be able to make music just a bit, but not as well as you would like to. I'd love to find out. But I can't fucking do it at all�.

I'M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF

I'm tone DUMB.

The tunes are there in my head. There they are all right, perfect to the last quarter-tone of pitch and the last hemi-demi-semi-quaver of time�.I can play them all effortlessly in my head."
(Moab is My Washpot)

And on and on he goes for like, three pages, lamenting this horrible state that is (now I have a name for it) tone dumbness. Seriously, it's tragic. One of the long-standing tragedies of my life. That and the fact that I cannot, no matter what, make myself eat things that are good for me.

So, thank you Stephen, for showing me that even brilliant people, perhaps especially brilliant people have things they just can't do.