These are Simmonds’ last resort, the relics I shall nurse until retirement or death, whichever comes the sooner. It is to one of these regions that I am heading now, to a downtrodden part of northern England where, in a wilderness of closed mines and disused shipyards, choral societies spend their year working up Messiah for Christmas, colliery villages have band calls twice a week and the roughest of rugby tacklers can play rude ballads on a pub piano, two-handed and with passable accuracy. Behind the coal-blackened fascias of terraced houses and defaced concrete council blocks, kids are made to play their scales before they have their tea. Beyond the electronic gates of executive lawn estates, music forms the first line of class-war defence: ‘If snot-nosed Kayleigh with a single mum can get Grade Three with merit in piano and violin, I want our Charlotte to show what she can do at the Easter AIDS Awareness Concert.’ Music took a bashing when Margaret Thatcher crushed the miners, but men who may never work again still approach me with urgent requests for a Trumpet Voluntary or singalong Elijah, and indigent single mothers with barely enough in their purses to put food on the table somehow manage to shell out for one of the tacky fiddles, made in China, that I carry as a tenuous sideline.

Unfailingly on my quarterly visits, I get asked to audition pre-matriculants who have applied for a place in one of London’s famed music colleges and academies. Invariably, I advise them to consider a different vocation than one that will take them no higher than the rear desk of an insecure provincial orchestra. ‘No matter,’ say the mums dismissively. ‘At least he won’t go down the pit like his dad.’ That cliché has rung all the hollower since the mines were shut, the shipyards became marinas and Dad was reduced to terminal unemployment or a demeaning ‘service industry’ existence as a waiter or tele-sales clerk. There will never be real work again around these parts for real men, let alone the dignity of labour.

The quick and the bright make an early escape, the quick to professionalised sport, the bright to chase musical dreams in rock groups and classical conservatories. My immediate destination, which must remain nameless, has never launched a star, but it has contributed any number of foot-soldiers to the musical army: boys who blow horns in opera orchestras and women who saw at violas as far afield as Sydney and Singapore, not to mention keyboardists for any number of backing groups. It yields the occasional ballet conductor and, once in a while, a contralto steeped in sacred oratorio. Stout and dependable performers, the soul and sinew of musical industry they are – a triumph of application over inspiration. I admire their grit as a dodo might nod to a dinosaur, two anachronisms trudging against the tides of fashion towards certain extinction.