Organs need a regular service by a specialist who pokes into their pipes and checks their bellows. An unserviced organ will continue to function for a while, slightly out of tune and making strange noises, until the organist tries something spectacular, when the thing will start to moan pathetically just as everyone is doing something important like welcoming the bishop.

But it is the personality of the organ, like the personality of the patient, that matters the most. Today I played an organ with two sets of manuals. Coupling the two, so that when you play one keyboard the other plays too, is needed for volume but is like fighting an angry kangaroo in a lycra straightjacket.

When you try to play Widor's Toccata (fast and loud) you feel as though you've gone two rounds on the relationship between food intake and weight with Mr Enormous (who wants to be a fireman and has failed to appreciate that if he came down a ladder with a damsel over his shoulder they would reach the ground far more quickly than either of them expected.)

The organ, like Mr Enormous, gives no ground, but organ music needs to reach a neat and appropriate end. Finishing halfway through out of exhaustion is as obvious to the congregation as a well-cooked fat man at a cannibal's party. The only excuse for stopping prior to the end is actual death; it has to be your own.

Similarly, once the consultation has started, Mr Enormous and I go round and round on the subject of why he is failing to waste away despite reducing to one pie a day (and culminates in my realising that this pie may, in fact, include a whole cow).

Of course, with organs or patients, if we stick to the easy stuff life is easier, the moments of exhaustion interrupted intermittently by the usual wheezes and farts are kept to a minimum and serenity reigns. But that wouldn't be playing the game? General practice, like organ playing is nothing if not challenging, but would you have it any other way?

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