The View From the Cello Section
Copyright© 2026 by Marc Nobbs
Chapter 3: Showing Up
Sunday 13th October 2013
Last Sunday, I wrote that I did not feel ready. This week has provided an irritatingly simple response. Go anyway.
Readiness, it turns out, is not checked at the door.
So, Good News! I have survived another week.
No one has discovered the administrative error which resulted in my admission to the Law course, and nobody has asked me to surrender my student card. Nobody stationed themselves outside the debating society, orchestra rehearsal, practice room or sports hall and demanded proof that I belonged there. I arrived. The door opened. Events continued with me present.
I am therefore beginning to entertain the possibility that they actually meant to let me in.
Last week I wrote quite a lot about feeling overwhelmed, which prompted a surprisingly large number of messages from current and former students telling me some variation of: Everybody feels like that.
This was reassuring. Less reassuring was the smaller group who said: You’ll still feel like that in third year.
Thank you for your contribution.
Law remains hard, and I remain occasionally convinced that everyone around me understands it better than I do. But I have now spent another week listening to some of those people speak in seminars and have reached an important preliminary conclusion: Some of them are simply more confident, and that is not the same thing.
I am trying to remember that.
More importantly, I’ve had a week containing considerably more than case law and reading lists. Quite a lot more, actually.
I may have accidentally joined university.
Properly.
The Westmouth Union
The Westmouth Union is the university’s debating society.
It is not the Students’ Union, despite being called the Westmouth Union and meeting in rooms belonging to the Students’ Union. This distinction is apparently obvious to everybody after somebody has explained it.
I joined at Freshers’ Fair because apparently doing a Law degree, playing in an orchestra, forming a quartet and returning to badminton did not occupy enough of my time.
‘The Union’ is actually older than the university itself. It was formed by students of the college that existed on the same campus before it became a university nearly 125 years ago.
It holds formal debates, public lectures, political discussions and occasional events featuring people important enough to require security. And it has a President who appears to regard every room as improved by his presence.
His name is Henry. He is intelligent, confident, eloquent and far too aware of all three.
He’s also irritatingly likeable.
The opening meeting included a demonstration debate by some of the older members.
I wasn’t debating. I had absolutely no intention of debating. I intended to sit quietly at the back and observe.
This intention lasted almost the whole evening.
The motion was: This House Would Abolish University Tuition Fees.
There were two principal speakers on each side. Those supporting the motion argued that education is a public good, that tuition fees discourage poorer students and that society collectively benefits from an educated population.
The opposition argued that graduates receive the greatest financial benefit from their degrees, that removing fees would subsidise people who later become relatively wealthy and that public money should be directed towards services used by everybody.
Both sides contained arguments I recognised.
Both sides also contained arguments that sounded less convincing when spoken by someone standing six feet away than when appearing as a quotation in a newspaper. The final opposition speaker relied heavily upon the graduate premium—the additional income graduates are expected to earn across their working lives. Because graduates generally earn more, he argued, it is reasonable for graduates rather than taxpayers to bear the cost of their education. It made sense.
Questions were invited from the floor.
Several hands rose.
Mine did not.
The first questions were confident but largely performative. One person asked whether education was a right or a commodity, which sounded impressive but allowed the speaker to repeat his opening argument. Another asked why a hospital cleaner should pay for somebody else to become a highly paid solicitor. The speaker answered each question with relative ease.
Then a question occurred to me.
I attempted to ignore it, but the question remained. It sat there, at the back of my mind. To me, it was such an obvious question that someone was bound to ask it.
But nobody did.
Eventually, I raised my hand.
Henry was chairing the debate from the front. He noticed me, looked briefly surprised, then smiled a ridiculously charming smile, then pointed at me.
I stood.
This was an error because standing meant everybody could see me.
I asked: “If graduates should pay fees directly because they benefit financially in the future, should businesses also contribute directly, given that employing an educated workforce leads to greater productivity and, ultimately, higher profits?”
The speaker replied that businesses already contribute through corporation tax.
This was a reasonable answer.
Unfortunately, it produced a follow-up question. I asked, “So do graduates through income tax. They already pay more when they earn more. Why does general taxation count as the business contribution but not the graduate contribution?”
There was a small sound around the room. Not applause. More the kind of noise people make when a tennis rally becomes unexpectedly interesting.
The speaker gave a longer answer about personal choice, limited public resources and the distinction between creating employment and accepting it.
I did not agree with all of it, but he answered the question properly.
I sat down.
My hands were shaking as I clasped them in my lap.
The motion carried by a comfortable margin. It was always going to. You don’t ask students paying £9,000 a year in tuition whether they would rather keep paying £9,000 or not.
I voted in favour, obviously, although I remain uncertain that abolishing tuition fees should take priority over improving maintenance support. Free tuition does not help somebody remain at university if they cannot afford rent, food or books.
No one made that point either. I should have raised that too.
Afterwards, Henry intercepted me near the door.
“Carrington, isn’t it?”
I confirmed that it was.
“First-year Law?”
I confirmed that too.
He asked whether I had debated before.
I said no.
He looked sceptical.
I explained that asking two questions did not constitute a debate. He said, “It does when the second question dismantles the answer to the first.”
I do not think it dismantled the answer. It identified an inconsistency and required the speaker to refine his argument. These are not the same thing.
Henry told me the Union would hold a first-year debate in November and that I should put my name forward. I said I would think about it.
He handed me the sign-up sheet.
I signed.
Apparently, I am taking part in a debate in November.
I do not know the motion, the date or which side I will be expected to defend. I do know that Henry smiled as though something had gone exactly according to plan. I already find this annoying.
The Celestial Quartet
Our string quartet met for its first rehearsal this week.
Maya arrived first and had already unpacked when Finn arrived carrying his viola, three different scores and enough food to survive a minor siege. Ari arrived precisely on time and observed that if the rest of us had also arrived precisely on time, nobody would have needed to classify the order.
I was last by approximately twenty seconds because the Campus Heights lift hates me.
We spent the first part of this “rehearsal” discussing what to call ourselves. This was clearly the most important musical question facing us.
Naming a string quartet is considerably harder than naming a band. Bands can call themselves almost anything, but string quartets seem obliged to sound as though they were either founded in Vienna in 1873 or have recently received an Arts Council grant.
We rejected surnames because none of our surnames sounded particularly impressive when combined. We rejected anything involving Westmouth because several university ensembles already use it in their names. We also rejected various musical terms because they all sounded unbearably pretentious.
We gave up. The name could wait.
The next issue was obvious. Who plays first violin?
Maya and Ari had spent our previous meeting behaving as though this question did not exist. Readers with string-quartet experience correctly informed me that this strategy would not survive our first rehearsal.
It lasted eleven minutes.
In fairness, there was no fight.
They are both very good violinists, and neither seems particularly obsessed with sitting in the first chair, so we are going to experiment with swapping depending on the music.
This feels sensible. It probably isn’t.
Then we moved on to discussing what to play.
Maya wanted Beethoven.
Ari wanted Shostakovich.
Finn wanted something audiences might recognise without having studied the history of twentieth-century Russian music.
I wanted Bach and Tchaikovsky. Obviously.
We eventually agreed that our first proper programme—whenever we have both a programme and somewhere to perform it—should contain Beethoven, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.
This is ambitious.
“Delusional” may prove more accurate after several rehearsals.
We’d like to add something a bit shorter and more casual. Finn recommended including the tango scene from the movie where Al Pacino plays a blind man and dances with a woman in a restaurant.
This description was surprisingly sufficient.
The piece is ‘Por una Cabeza’ by Carlos Gardel. It also appeared in True Lies and several other films during the nineties. Finn had brought an arrangement for string quartet with him. Playing it requires precision, confidence and the ability to sound spontaneous while following a carefully agreed interpretation.
In other words, it is a string quartet compressed into four minutes.
The arrangement is enormous fun.
Possibly too much fun.
We began playing it “just to see what it sounded like” and twenty minutes later had achieved absolutely nothing useful because we kept changing the tempo and trying increasingly ridiculous amounts of rubato.
Finn believes this qualifies as interpretation.
I believe Finn needs supervision.
We also began work on one of Beethoven’s Opus 18 quartets. It will need considerable work if we ever want to perform it in public. But there are moments when everything suddenly locks together, and you get a glimpse of what we could sound like—when four separate sounds align and become something none of us could produce alone.
That feeling is addictive and worth pursuing.
With approximately ten minutes left, the main light went out. The emergency light remained on above the door, but it was not bright enough to read by. We each had a small battery-powered light clipped to our music stands, so we turned them on and decided to continue until someone came to investigate.
The rest of the room disappeared.
There were four pools of light, four stands and four instruments suspended in the darkness.
Maya said it looked as if we were playing among the stars.
Finn suggested we should call ourselves The Heavenly Bodies.
Ari said that it sounded like a strip club, and we rejected it unanimously.
I suggested The Celestial Quartet.
For the first time all evening, nobody argued.
So that is our name.
It is not a reference to our playing. At present, The Occasionally Competent Quartet would be more accurate.
But for a few minutes, in a dark rehearsal room lit only by our stands, we were The Celestial Quartet.
No performances are scheduled.
No one has asked to hear us.
We have Beethoven, a tango and a name. Eventually, we may add Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.
But that feels like enough to begin with. For now.
Orchestra
I have missed orchestra. There, I said it.
Nobody mention Leipzig.
Fourth Desk still feels like a good place to be. There are people ahead of me who are considerably better players, which I like.
That probably sounds strange.
At youth orchestra, particularly during my final year, I reached the point where I knew most of the repertoire would be within my ability before I even opened the folder.
That is comfortable.
It is also dangerous.
Comfort makes it very easy to stop improving.
At rehearsal, there were passages where I had to concentrate. Properly. And there were moments where the principal cellist marked a fingering, and I looked at it and thought: Oh.
Then tried it.
Then thought: Oh, that’s much better.
This is what I wanted.
I didn’t come to university to be the best cellist in the room.
I came to become a better one.
Our first concert will be in the middle of December, just before everybody disappears for Christmas.
The proposed programme is:Sibelius — FinlandiaGrieg — Piano Concerto in A minorDvořák — Symphony No. 8
I like that. Dvořák understood cellos.
Some composers appear to regard us as an unusually expensive piece of rhythm equipment.
Dvořák knew better.
We began with Finlandia.
The opening chords answered any remaining concern that Fourth Desk might feel insignificant.
In a youth orchestra, I knew almost everybody around me. I knew how the principal cellist would approach a phrase, where the second violins tended to rush and which conductor’s gesture meant “slower” despite looking exactly like his gesture for “louder.”
At Westy, I know none of those things yet. The players around me are unfamiliar. The conductor’s movements require translation. The section has established habits I have not learned.
For the first half-hour, I concentrated so intensely upon the bowing marks that I barely heard the orchestra.
Then we repeated a passage.
This time, I looked up.
The brass entered behind us. The basses moved beneath the cellos. The violins rose over the top, and the separate parts became the piece I recognised.
I was inside it.
Fourth Desk no longer felt like a result written beside my name after an audition.
It was simply where the music reached me.
By the end, my fingers hurt, my shoulders ached and there was rosin everywhere. And I walked back to Campus Heights feeling better than I had all week.
Apparently, I needed that.
Badminton
Wednesday afternoon lectures are suspended so that students can participate in sport.
I have spent the previous two Wednesdays participating in avoidance.
This week, Lily refused to permit it. She came with me, which prevented me from discovering an urgent academic reason to remain in the library all afternoon.
She had described her badminton ability as resembling “an intoxicated giraffe.”
This turned out to be unfair.
To giraffes.
We arrived after the session had already started because neither of us realised quite how quickly the courts fill up. There were dozens of players, shuttles moving in every direction and the familiar layered sound of rubber soles, racquets and voices calling scores.
I had missed that sound more than I realised.
Paul was already playing with three of his friends: Mark, Phil and Jem.
For anyone who missed last week’s post, Paul is someone from Micester High who is now in his second year at Westmouth. He saw us near the entrance and came over. I had warmed up before leaving the flat. I warmed up again while we waited. I tested my knee carefully—bending, turning and putting weight through it.
It felt stable.
That did not stop me worrying.
Phil asked which of us was the stronger player because he was partnering one of us against Paul.
Lily immediately pointed at me.
This was both accurate and disloyal.
So, Phil and I played against Paul and Lily.
Lily had not exaggerated when she said she had not played for a long time. There were moments when her relationship with the shuttle seemed to be conducted entirely through email.
Paul attempted to compensate for her.
And he nearly succeeded.
He is a much better player than I expected. He moves quickly, reads the court well and possesses the deeply irritating refusal to concede a point until the shuttle has actually touched the floor.
I should probably feel bad about what happened.
I do not.
I enjoyed beating him immensely.
There is something extraordinarily satisfying about hitting a smash past the head of someone you knew at school. Particularly when they have spent the previous ten minutes looking increasingly irritated by the fact that their partner is struggling to return a serve.
The final point came from a high return, which allowed me to smash the shuttle past him with power.
“And that’s the game,” I said.
Then, because victory had temporarily returned me to being sixteen, I added, “Take that, Head Townie.”
This requires some explanation.
Micester is divided between the Townies—those of us who lived in the town—and the Villagers from the wealthy communities surrounding it. When Paul became closely associated with one particularly prominent Villager at school, people started referring to them as the Head Townie and Head Villager.
It was childish then.
It was more childish now.
In explaining this to the others, I referred to her by her surname, which was disrespectful. Paul corrected me. He was right to do so, and I apologised. People deserve their names, particularly when they can no longer insist on their use themselves.
I will not say more because it is not my story to tell.
Paul then suggested that I enter one of the club’s tournaments.
I declined.
Paul said I was good enough.
I declined less firmly.
Phil mentioned an upcoming mixed-doubles tournament and suggested that Paul and I enter together.
This was not a suggestion I was prepared for.
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