I HAVE played the guitar for ever, not that you’d know it some stumble finger days.

At my boys’ grammar school in the early 1970s, I gave a mini-recital of a study by Matteo Carcassi, an Italian guitarist and composer born in Florence in 1792 (or so it says here on Wikipedia).

Etude Op 60, No 3. Recalling that title is no feat of memory. It’s just that I have picked up the piece again more than 50 years later.

My guitar teacher was called Robert. He used to cycle with a guitar in a hard case and a rucksack full of bricks. He was in training to ride somewhere far from Cheadle Hulme, Spain perhaps.

My performance went OK but Robert said I should have tuned my guitar beforehand. I made a mental note of his advice. It is still there just in case there ever is another public performance.

I abandoned the classical guitar as a teenager, you see. It didn’t exactly rock; and the pieces became harder and harder. A foolish decision, it now seems, but we are all made of those.

I have lessons again now, every other week online, with a teacher here in York. Andy is very good, keeps me ticking over and hardly ever sighs at my innate lack of rhythm. We cover all sorts from the Beatles to Bach, with blues and jazz in between, plus scales. The piece I am presently doing a disservice to is Strawberry Fields Forever.

I like all sorts of guitarists, but particularly folk-rockers such as the great Richard Thompson, Bert Jansch or John Martyn, another acoustic hero.

Over the years I have played, or tried to play, songs by Thompson as collected in his songbooks. When interviewing him once, I said his songs were hard to play. “They’re meant to be,” he said with a chuckle.

Anyway, back to Carcassi.

The sheet music for that one came in an email, as usual. With tablature alongside the score as my music reading is rusty. Printing this off, I squinted at the musical jigsaw puzzle. Ah, yes, that chord goes there, fits into that chord, as the tune rises up the neck.

Fingers old and not so pliable mostly knew where to go. I was back in the school hall, nervous with the audience before me. Playing a guitar I’d forgotten to tune. After my recital there was a guitar trio comprised of me, Robert, the cycling-with-bricks teacher, and a younger but better student who surely went on to grace other stages; unlike me.

A long time to have been playing the guitar. By this stage of life, you have done most things for an era or two. You stumble on. You get better. You get worse. But it’s the doing that matters. The keeping going, the pursuit of the unattainable, the barely attainable, the doable. You walk that road. Strum that chord. Write those words. Bake that bread, or whatever it is that you like to do.

To borrow a phrase, you just do it. And just doing is good, or better than not doing.

Late in the evening, after my wife has retreated upstairs, I play while watching television. A few scales. Or laying one chord on another. Over and over. And I always tune the guitar first.

After I stopped having classical lessons, I briefly taught a younger boy. He graduated to a proper guitar teacher, who said he’d been taught well, so that was something.

We have three grown-up children, and the middle one is a much better guitarist than his dad. Late at night at his house, after his partner has retreated, he fetches his guitar from his study, goes back downstairs and plays while waiting for their cat to come back indoors.

In the past week I have seen two singer-songwriters who can hold an audience with guitar and voice.

John Smith gave a captivating show at City Varieties in Leeds. He is on tour marking his twentieth anniversary as a professional musician, having started out supporting John Martyn two decades ago.

He fills an auditorium with his fiendish finger-picking and strumming and a resonant voice. He is engagingly self-mocking, too. And his performance of Winter, guitar open-tuned and laid across his lap, fingers beating out the rhythm on the body, was stunning.

A late change of plan allowed me to nip and see folk singer Chris Wood at the NCEM in York, having long admired his albums, especially So Much To Defend. His songs address the everyday, fatherhood, local football, the trials of being a musician, and are quietly philosophical, too.

Eccentric, quirky, the emotion spilling over at times. Another fine guitarist, despite some trouble with his lead.

He introduced a song written for a lifelong male friend. On hearing the song, the pal had said the song was shit. It wasn’t but that was Wood’s wry aside on male bonding, men hiding their affection behind rudeness. Another great night.