My name is John Daker

Performance anxiety.

I remember when I did my grade 2 piano exam. It was held in a church hall in Warragul, a town that is about 100km east of Melbourne. The examiner was a curly grey-haired woman, with slightly orange teeth, and seemed pleased with the first part of the test, where I went through some scales and chords. Not bad. But then it came to the recital bit, and the first of four pieces. The first piece was always meant to stretch you technically in these things; I'd made it to the middle without a glitch (although the hall's reverberation made the staccato notes sound less stabby) and I heard from the examiner's table what I thought was a weird laugh.

I stopped. I turned my head to check. She coughed, scribbling a note. She wasn't laughing weirdly; she coughed weird. I had stopped for an older lady's weird cough, felt stupid, felt evil that I'd called attention to it, and resumed.

My hands stumbled through the remainder of the notes, like a drunk army marching through a forest - i.e. into the tree trunks.

It felt like a disaster, the final three pieces. Then we came to the listening test segment. I was twelve and my voice had begun to break. The examiner neither coughed or laughed. I went home and sobbed.

I wonder what John Daker did.