What comes around goes around!

A few years ago I saw an advert for a small piano sized electric organ in our local shop window.

Great I thought, that will be a good way to introduce some music into the home, and see if I can add pedals to the idea of playing the piano.

It didn’t take long to track down the owner, but unfortunately the organ was in a back room, down two sets of stairs, round a corner, in a house which was isolated and difficult to find. Whereas I should have gone along with a team of

people, there were only three of us to move the instrument, but we eventually managed to move the thing out of the house, and into a trailer which we used to transport it to our house.

My wife thought I was mad, but I really liked it because it only had the sound of an organ, not a choice of sounds. It even had stops, not buttons to choose the different pipes you wanted to use.

Actually we were undertaking a great deal of building work at the time thus when our local church’s organ came to the end of it’s life, it seemed a good idea to offer them the chance to have this piece. It was ten times better than the original and sounded wonderful: job done!

However, last year some kind soul left money to the church and it was decided that the churcch could afford a new organ.

It duly arrived and our old one was moved to an alcove at the back of the church: I was asked to remove it.

Where was I going to put it? By chance we had acquired an almost new one ourselves and nobody seemed to want this old but wonderful piece.

We tried Ebay – no luck. Adverts – again no interest. The pressure started to grow.

People were asking me to move that old organ of mine. Letters started to arrive. Could I please take it away – I became the bad guy.

Eventually, I made contact with a man in London who would be happy to take it away for free, but he wanted to hear it play. Whoops!  It was already loaded on my trailer!

But I managed to position trailer and load near an electric socket and in broad daylight, with the aid of the mobile phone, I stood and played a range of music!  Our customer was happy.

He agreed to come at about eight o’clock one Saturday morning, but actually arrived two hours ahead of time at six in the morning!

The man brought his wife, dressed in her national dress, explaining that they wanted the organ for a church in their village back in Ghana. They had never ventured outside London, so this visit to the country was a major event. They joined us for breakfast and we showed our children a map depicting where the organ would eventually go.

The man was built like an ox and he and his wife together were quite happy to lift the instrument and put it in the back of their vehicle.

Funny old life!

By Bob Derham