The most obvious instrument is the piano — the keyboard being central to the development of the Western musical tradition. Unfortunately, years of guitar-playing has made the piano, for me, an impossible instrument. I get this vertiginous feeling when sitting behind the instrument — there is some kind of figurative chasm between myself and the sound production. I want to feel the resistance of a string as my flesh pushes and pulls it. Instead I feel a detachment: why is this strange and enormous sound resulting, by some complicated mechanical process, from lightly touching a key?

Even bows and reeds I find off-putting (as a player, that is). The wind instrument I do love is the recorder. When I spent a couple of months playing around with one of those cheap and cheerful plastic tenor recorders, I was spellbound by the way I could feel my breath move softly through the instrument. It is one of my favourite instruments to listen to, regardless of its slight repertoire.

There is one keyboard instrument whose expressive potential is, I imagine, closest to my ideal: the clavichord. You will have noticed a theme, perhaps — that I prefer quieter instruments. Where this comes from I don’t know, especially given that as a teenager I enjoyed brutally loud music (extreme metal etc.)

Ah, but there is an exception. I do like the organ (and also the accordion, come to think of it). Part of this is because both my uncle and my mother are organists. I sometimes wish I could play it well enough to accompany a normal church service. I think I also like it partly because of its situation: the acoustics of a church makes its sound much more attractive. Whereas piano or clarinet, say, is commonly practised and played in the home, where I find their volume hard to take. I just don’t like making a lot of noise.

I do wonder if I might eventually end up playing the lute. I adore the Renaissance lute repertoire more than any other repertoire, but unfortunately I find it ungraceful on the guitar, so almost never play it. You may think that playing the lute is much like the guitar — an easy switchover — but when I did borrow a lute for a few months I found it an entirely different creature. The unfamiliarity of the experience was a great shock and part of the reason I reverted to the guitar.