Multiple choice: parte 5 del B2 First

For most of my life, I was the person who moved her lips during 'Happy Birthday'. At primary school, a music teacher had once asked me, kindly but firmly, to sing a little more quietly, and I had taken the hint so seriously that I hardly opened my mouth for the next thirty years. So when my friend Elena suggested that I come along to her community choir, I laughed. Then I realised she wasn't joking.

Elena's argument was simple. The choir, which met every Tuesday evening in the hall behind the local library, did not hold auditions. Nobody would ask me to sing alone, and nobody would mind if I got things wrong, because, as she put it, 'half of us get things wrong every week and the other half are too busy counting to notice.' I agreed to go once, mainly so that she would stop asking.

That first evening was not a success, at least not in the way I had hoped. I had imagined slipping in at the back and listening for an hour. Instead, the conductor, a cheerful retired engineer called Martin, divided us into groups according to how high or low our voices were. This involved each person singing a single note while he listened. When my turn came, my voice came out as a thin, uncertain sound, and I felt my face turn red. Martin simply nodded, said 'Alto,' and moved on to the next person. It was over in three seconds, but I spent most of the following hour wondering whether I could leave without anyone noticing.

I stayed, though, and something unexpected happened during the last song. We had been learning it line by line, and the altos had a part that sounded rather dull on its own, just a few notes repeated over and over. Then Martin brought all the groups in together. Suddenly my boring little line fitted underneath the tune like a missing piece of a puzzle, and the whole room seemed to fill with sound. I was part of that sound. I couldn't have told you whether I was singing well, but for the first time in my life I didn't care.

I have been going back every Tuesday for two years now. My voice has not changed dramatically; I will never be asked to perform a solo, and I am quite happy about that. What has changed is the way I think about learning. Like many adults, I had divided the world into things I was good at and things I was not, and I had stopped trying anything in the second group. The choir showed me that this division was largely in my head. Being bad at something, I discovered, is only embarrassing if you believe that everyone else is watching you, and in a room full of people concentrating on their own music, nobody is.

Last month, Elena told me that she had nearly given up on persuading me. 'You were the most stubborn person I'd ever invited,' she said. I reminded her that I had only agreed in order to make her stop. She smiled and said that was exactly why she had kept asking: she had known that once I was through the door, the music would do the rest. I suspect she was right, though I have not told her so. I don't want her to start choosing my hobbies.

For three years I have presented a programme on a small community radio station, every Thursday from eleven at night until one in the morning. When I tell people this, they usually ask how many listeners I have, and I have learnt to give an honest answer: I don't really know. The station can measure how many people are connected to the online stream, but most of our audience still listens on old-fashioned radios, in kitchens, cars and hospital wards, and nobody counts them. For a long time this bothered me. Now I think it is one of the best things about the job.

I never planned to work in radio. I was a librarian, and the station was in the same building as my library, on the floor above. One evening the manager, a cheerful man called Victor, came down to borrow a book and mentioned that the presenter of the late show was moving abroad. 'You've got the right voice for it,' he said, which surprised me, because nobody had ever commented on my voice before. I assumed he was simply being polite, or desperate. It turned out he was a bit of both, but he also lent me an old recorder and asked me to read a few pages of my favourite novel into it. Two weeks later I was on air.

The first few programmes were terrible. I had prepared every word in advance, and I read my notes so quickly that I often finished a link with a whole minute still to fill. Victor never complained. Instead, he would leave little messages on my desk: 'Slow down. The night is long.' What finally changed things was a phone call. About forty minutes into my fifth show, a woman rang to say she worked nights at a bakery and had the radio on while she made the bread. She didn't want to request a song; she just wanted to tell me what she could smell. I put her on air, almost without thinking, and we talked for ten minutes about bread. After that, I stopped writing scripts.

These days the programme is mostly made by the listeners. People ring in or send messages, and I read them out between the records. There is a taxi driver who reports on the weather from different parts of the city, and a retired teacher who sets a quiz question every week and is furious if anyone answers it too quickly. None of this sounds very exciting, I know. But at that hour, people talk in a different way. They are tired, the house is quiet, and they seem to say things they would never say during the day.

Not every call is easy. Once, a young man rang just after midnight and told me, in a very flat voice, that he could not sleep and did not see the point of anything. I had no training for this, and my first instinct was to play a song and give myself time to think. I didn't. I kept him talking, gently, about nothing in particular, his dog, a film he had liked, while the station's assistant found the number of a support line. Weeks later, a card arrived at the station with no name on it, just the words 'Thank you for staying.' I keep it in my wallet.

People sometimes ask whether I would like to move to a bigger station, with a proper audience and a salary. I have thought about it. But I suspect that on a bigger station, the woman from the bakery would never have got through, and if she had, someone would have told me to cut her off and play the next song. On Thursday nights, I do not know exactly who is listening. I only know that somebody is, and that is enough.