Giving up the quest for inner peace and undistracted by the silvered February landscape, my attention turns to business, which barely needs it. The company I keep going is a spectre of the firm that my father founded in 1919 ‘to advance the appreciation of music among men and women of modest means’. In its heyday, Simmonds was a household name, to be found in the nation’s living rooms among the Wedgwood teacups, Hornby toys and grafted aspidistras in Robertson’s jampots. Simmonds (Symphonic Scores and Concerts) Ltd manufactured piano reductions of orchestral masterpieces, issued in noble purple covers for the uniform price of sixpence. We also produced popular lives of the great composers, albumised folk-songs and approachable novelties by uncelebrated living composers. But the heart of Simmonds was the concert division, which organised orchestral nights for all the family, grannies to toddlers, at group discounts that worked out at less than the price of a cinema seat.

Simmonds’ suite of offices, nuzzling the old Queen’s Hall at the top of Regent Street, buzzed seven days a week with unprofitable ideas, artistic aspirations and fatally entrapped wasps. No window was ever opened, for fear of diluting the fug of inspiration. Elbow-patched pianists in pursuit of unpaid fees jostled students and factory workers waiting for last-minute penny tickets. Trilby-hatted newspapermen interviewed stateless conductors in secluded corners – on one occasion, apparently, in the left hand stall of the ladies’ washroom where the cistern drip-dripped so relentlessly that an idle wit attributed the metronomic tempi of that night’s Tchaikovsky Fifth to the inadequacies of Simmonds’ plumbing.

My father, hunched behind a pyramid of unread contracts and uncorrected page-proofs, presided at all hours over his musical emporium, seldom locking up before midnight. ‘I can’t leave the place empty,’ he would say. ‘Who knows when the next Kreisler might walk in?’ Half a century before open-plan offices, he took his door off its hinges, the better to observe all comings and goings. No artist ever entered unnoticed. As mail piled up and secretaries resigned in tears, my father juggled three telephone receivers simultaneously, virtuosically and without ever raising his voice.