Kelly Rose Bradford: A mover not a shaker

Aug 18 2009 Surrey Herald

BOY wants a piano. Or, more to the point, Boy needs a piano.

At the moment his lessons at school are being supplemented with just a 15-minute, twice-aweek practice session at his nan's house on a keyboard, which has made him most proficient at knocking out Happy Birthday to a back beat of bongo drums, but which isn't really going to turn him into Liberace.

As I've mentioned here before, I quite like the idea of a piano just for aesthetic purposes, and as another surface on which to place all the rubbish I acquire on a weekly basis. What I'm not so keen on is the thought of Boy crashing up and down the keys from dawn until dusk and sending racing cars and toys clattering

across the ivories. But his constant asking has finally worn me down, and I have (begrudgingly) accepted that he does actually need one if he is to progress with his music.

So recently I've been scouring the small ads, cards in shop windows and eBay. Just a small upright, which could be wedged, inconspicuously, somewhere in my already overcrowded, cluttered house. But to no avail. Boy, it seemed, was destined to a life of piano practice in his nan's back bedroom.

Then, out of the blue, a friend emailed me with news of one being given away on the Freecycle website. Result. Not only was it free, it was also local. What luck.

Or so I thought.

It never occurred to me what an impossible task it would actually be to get it from its present location to my house.

Just how do you shift a piano? "You'll need a specialist mover," one purist musical friend instructed me. "One who will wrap it up and take great care when moving it around."

"You just need four strong blokes and a van," said another.

"No one will touch a piano," said a third, directing me to various pages on the internet depicting pianos being shifted by chimps and Laurel and Hardy.

Rubbish, I thought. How difficult can it be to move a piano a few miles down the road? So I phoned around some removal firms. Some of my calls became mysteriously disconnected as soon as I said the P word, others were more polite: "We don't do pianos,"

I was told, several times over. Along with "We would do it, but we don't have a tail lift."

Finally, I found someone willing to shift it. For £125.

One hundred and twenty five pounds! For a six-mile round trip? My free piano was suddenly becoming very expensive. I spluttered my thanks-but-no-thanks down the phone and reassessed the situation - which I think is going to involved Boy switching to flute lessons, because I can fit any number of those in my car. And for the time being, it's back to Nan's back bedroom.