This has never happened to me – usually I break a new A string by tuning it too quickly – but I have so much sympathy for him.

I have two concerts coming up within two weeks, and I’ve just realised that I need to replace my strings – all of them. I put a full set of Eudoxa gut strings on my cello in September of 2002 as an experiment, because I love the deep mellow sound gut produces. The D string broke first, followed shortly by the A. My emergency replacement A string is now unravelling (no surprise there; it’s a Thomastik Dominant, and the wrapping on Dominant A strings is coarse and dreadful); my replacement D string was salvaged from my original overstretched Aricore set that was put on six years ago; and the G and D strings are still the gut strings that have now stretched beyond proper sonority. I hadn’t realised all of this until lately, now that I’ve been really digging into the lower strings (love that Beethoven!).

I guess I know where the student payments that are beginning to trickle in for the new semester are going.