I’ve been a whistler for at least a decade. Growing up, I played the cello and the piano and sang in the school choir, but whistling is the only form of musical performance at which I am anything approaching remarkable. I whistle when I am happy, and I whistle when I am walking or riding my bike, which is why I generally don’t use an iPod - because it takes away the pleasure. I do not whistle when I am depressed, and indeed sometimes it is the absence of the urge to whistle that tips me off to the fact that I am teetering, that I have to go back on Prozac.
Though, if pressed, I am such a talented whistler I can even whistle rap songs, my usual repetoire is quite small, and predominantly features two concertos that my brother used to play on his French horn: one by Haydn, one by Mozart. These were his big grading pieces two years in a row, and thus I heard them over and over again, for days and weeks and months at a time, and they are still ingrained in my brain: the trills, the arpeggios, even the cadenzas. It’s kind of bizarre but also a little charming (although one former flatmate of mine didn’t think so: ‘could you not whistle in the morning?’ she once requested, staring at me with baleful, bleary eyes.)
But do you know what is even more charming? As I descended the escalator on the tube this evening, jauntily tootling away at my usual Mozart riff, someone on the escalator next to me joined in. I was so astonished, so delighted, that I lost my place in the concerto. I may have to retire from whistling; it will never again be so good.
