Cream: It had that soft squashy feeling when you won and when you were boozing in the bar - underage - with your 'family'.  It could be sour when you lost and you thought the adjudicator must be deaf or corrupt or both! I remember it often squirted out of both ends the following morning when you'd overdone it!

Icing: It was bright and brittle and glitzy. You and your mates were brash and sang all manner of rude songs on the coach going home. (Incidentally, Eagley - my first band - had some of the most musical vocalists of any band I've ever played with) The occasional rumble when someone was accused of cheating only added decorations to the thrill.

These days, I look at contests with tired and occasionally cynical eyes. After 35 years of them I find the thought of the extra practice and trying to fit rehearsals around work and juggling my time with my family a bit of a strain. How much time it takes up is obviously reflected - one hopes - in the result at the end of the day. But is it worth it? Many contests have laughable prize money. Some contests are still offering the same prize money as they did 30 years ago! Admittedly, organizing contests is more expensive than it used to be and sponsorship is much harder to come by, but "The Brass Band" has still not shrugged off its cloth cap and whippet stereotype, and the great unwashed still think brass players work down't pit and keep coal in't bath.

In recent years the playing of brass instruments in schools has, generally, taken a nose dive since parents have had to pay for lessons. It seems that either parents don't want to pay for lessons on what are often seen as 'common' instruments or pupils don't want to play brass instruments because they are not perceived as 'cool'. Instead, we get shedfulls of barely adequate 3-chorders on guitar and people who can't be bothered to learn proper fingering opting for electronic keyboard so they can emulate their favourite pop group while miming for doting mummy and daddy.

Where do we go from here?

When I first fell in love with my instrument, I used to practice all the hours God sent. I skipped my regular timetabled lessons at school, especially games and history. My games teachers were sadists but although they missed torturing me every week, they were just as glad I wasn't there as I was. My history teacher was a lovely old man who loved his subject much much more than I did, which just about broke his heart. He never realised that, had he been teaching me about knights and castles and dragons, I would have been riveted to my seat and he would have had to mark every one of my homeworks. As it was, he never had to mark more than 3 a year because that was all I did - if he was unlucky. If you've never seen my handwriting, consider yourself well off!

Once I had mastered the simple relationships between the valves and the notes, and the  complicated timing between hand, eye and mouth, you couldn't hold me back. I practiced and practiced and practiced until I became solo Eb bass with the school band and had driven both my parents and the neighbours on both sides to seek counselling. Then I stopped.

Since then - aged about 14 - I have rarely practiced outside of the bandroom. This was true throughout the rest of my teenage until I went into the army. While there I practiced 8 or more hours a day and thought nothing of following this with a concert, including a solo, and then a supper of more practice.

After leaving the army I went back to being a teenager, and now I rarely take my instrument out of its case - except when there is no band practice for a few weeks - outside of the bandroom. I know this is wrong. I spend a lot of my time telling young players to practice and I feel guilty. What kind of example am I? Well, I tell myself that I practiced enough when I was younger. I don't have enough time or space to practice in now because my house is small, I never get any time at work, I'm too tired after work and so on and so on. Does this sound familiar? I'm sure it does.

What I often find difficult to get across to young players is the amount of practice and LEARNING  you have to do if you want to succeed on your chosen instrument. I have pupils who, in spite of the fact that they know 70 or 80 THOUSAND  words in their own language, several HUNDRED  words in foreign languages, many technical terms and jargon words of their school subjects, and so on, can't be bothered to learn a few letters and symbols and a few finger combinations in order to play better on their instruments. It's frustrating. Parents are just as bad. "Oh, I don't want to put pressure on him!", "I want her to enjoy her music!" Am I unusual in that for me, the joy was :Making myself better as a player; Rising to the challenge; Working up to and beyond the limitations of the instrument; Making music that nobody else had made?

I had a curiosity about my instrument. I wanted to find out what I could make it do. What I couldn't make it do, and then try and find a way around the limitations. Most children don't seem to want to bother. I was lucky, I suppose, in having a band that was nearly 200 strong at school (I was one of 15 basses). These days I'm jolly lucky if a full quartet turns up. This is surprising as, in its prime, the school band was 15 or 20 strong. We do have about 15 brass players in school, but few of them are willing to come to the school band these days - even though they play in bands outside school. I've seen several of them in uniform today - and many parents are not at all supportive of the school band - well, little Gemima can't play a solo in your school band because of all those nasty older children with more experience and better skills.

Modern parents sicken me!

Try listening in to conversations at contests (occupational hazard) and you will hear all sorts of nasty comments going about. Rather than help each other and accept that for a particular purpose the MD has decided to use such and such a player as 4th man down on the back row to give the younger players the benefit of her experience and boost the sound a little, they talk of people being 'demoted' to the back row, or such-a-body has gone on 2nd baritone because they weren't good enough, when in fact, they were a better player than so-and-so and agreed to help out when the usual 2nd baritone player went down with flu. To be quite honest, I'd much rather have a superb 3rd cornet than a mediocre Rep.

You can understand, to a certain extent, a bit of bitchiness between rival bands, it's the nature of contesting to do your rival down - look at any political rally (especially in the US) - but does it have to go to the lengths that it does? at the end of the day, aren't we all bandsmen and women? (and children) shouldn't we concentrate on making a strong community spirit? Let's face the bald truth. At this moment in time, we all need to!

Unfortunately for the LC's credibility, it seemed to give money to those who didn't really need it and not give it to those that did. It was a sort of Robin Hood in reverse.

Bands that weren't benefiting their communities by producing young bands were getting shedfulls of money thrown at them and bands that had spawned two or more offspring were ignored, though their needs were often great. Bands that already owned their own bandrooms were given money to improve them, but bands that needed cash to buy their own premises to store instruments and make even more baby bands possible couldn't get a bean.

And so it went on.. Eventually, those bands who couldn't get any cash or beans from the LC gave up believing in it and sought money elsewhere. Many of these got promotion in the band world and made success out of their hardship. Several of the bands who got beans or cash left a nasty smell behind when they folded and the nice shiny-new instruments were left gathering dust in an empty (but shiny-new)  bandroom cupboard with no-one to play them.

Oh how the makers of instruments and the sellers of bandrooms and the architects laughed. After all, they were the ones who had all the money!

As a final thought. Ask any mathematician and they will tell you that the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at mathematics. That, I think, works both ways!

Unless of course their band wins.

It is the winning that counts. Second place is nothing. It is the feeling you get (after the hysteria that follows the announcement has abated) when you know you've put on your best performance and been rewarded appropriately by the cherubic adjudicator who beams down benevolently at you from his position of Jovian superiority on the podium with rays of glory streaming from his white-bearded, fatherly cheeks.

Winning heals all ills. It makes the silent meals and loud in-between periods when you are trying to practice worthwhile. All that time spent in rehearsals and home practice, the hours of dedication, poring over your part, extra sectionals, missed meals, missed drinks, missed children has come to beautiful fruition.

Let's be real about it. This is a transfer of the killer instinct. It's a war of notes and sounds. Devil take the hindmost.

But spare a thought for the losers. They have spent just as much time and energy and had just as many divorce threats as you have. They have done as much work on their version of the piece, but the adjudicator didn't like theirs as much as he was particularly fond of yours.

The world of band contests is a cut-throat down and dirty place. How often have you seen the scurrying for revenge amongst the vanquished? It starts almost before the dust has settled on the dried-up pasties in the cafe. This behaviour is understandable, if not altogether condonable. What often makes it worse is the taunting that often takes place afterwards - usually in the bar, and usually as the result of over-indulgence in various flavours of coca-cola. "You played crap!", "Yer sop was suckin' on it!" were two recent comments overheard - hardly designed to engender feelings of friendship and camaraderie.

At the Blackpool contest, one player from a losing band struck another player from the winning band and shouted "You have no right to win. We should have won it!" She was correct, of course. Nobody has the right to win. Only the band that the adjudicator feels is the best should win the prize but no one has a right to a prize.

Why do we have adjudicators? No one likes them, they don't even like each other, their own wives and husbands are probably only slightly fond of them. Why? Because they are necessary. If it wasn't for adjudicators the band world would disintegrate into a bloody internecine strife as rivals sought to wrest the various prizes from each other with physical instead of aural violence. The word adjudicator comes from the Latin word for a judge. The person who decides. In this case it is which band, heard on the day, is the best at playing that particular piece on that particular day. According to his or her opinion. One often hears the accusation of deafness (selective or total) hurled at adjudicators. I'm fairly sure they sometimes wish they were deaf. It is simply that the adjudicator has their own opinion of how a piece should be played - just like you have and, just like you they are entitled to express that opinion. In fact we, through the agency of the contest system, pay them to judge our performances.

I have no great fondness for adjudicators per se. Like any other collection of vaguely human beings they are an infinitely variable commodity. There are good, bad and indifferent ones. We hope they are professional, we hope they are competent, but we never can tell. The same adjudicator who gave us the second section trophy this year put us in last place three years ago in a lower section. Who is to say which is right? It is ALL down to a matter of opinion.

It must be a bit like being a golf widow. Off goes your spouse (boy/girlfriend/ parent), leaving you to fend for yourself but expecting consolation when they lose, a hearty congratulations when they win, frequent rehearsal nights, weekend band jobs, walking days, home practice etc. etc., and all the time, unless you're a bandsperson yourself, you are screaming inside for a respite, peace and quiet, heavy metal rock music ANYTHING!

"Sorry love, we can't go on the fortnight's holiday to Mauritius, it's the contest season. The Areas are less than two weeks after that. See if you can't get time off after that."

"Sorry love the central heating will have to wait, I need a new bass mute. I'll get one of those electric ones then the neighbours'll stop moaning about me practicing at 4:00am."

Why do you put up with us and all we inflict on you? Is our eccentricity somehow appealing? Do you really relish those early morning set-offs to Little Mold in the Wash because our section is playing to one man and a ferret at 8:00am? or the late night wake-up call when we finally arrive home sozzled as a newt because - as we tell everyone who's still breathing WE WON, WE WON, WE WON and promptly launch into the most scurrilous verses of "We are the Champions" in a voice to wake the dead.

As you struggle with the kids in the morning are you really all that interested in a discussion of the finer points of fingering, the latest test piece by such and so or whether the band should play in jackets or waistcoats? Does it matter to you whether the adjudicator at the last contest actually had any parents, or whether so and so split 3 notes at the start of the concert last night?

I doubt it.

But there you are, quietly (or otherwise) supporting, comforting, in the background. Often forgotten or taken for granted, sometimes sniggered about when your partner is in his/her cups. Taking care of the little things so that we can take care of the rest.

To all those partners, the long-suffering men and women (and children too) I'd just like to say the word that's so often forgotten -

Thanks.