Music is something you enjoy listening to as a child and as you develop, your love of music tends to stay with you, although the type of music you enjoy sometimes changes over the years.

When Minna Keal was a child, she learned to play the piano and so started her great love of music. After leaving High School, she enrolled as a student at The Royal Academy of Music in London, but had to give it all up, when her father died suddenly, leaving her short of funds. She had to find work quickly in order to support herself and she found a rather monotonous job working in an office. Eventually, she found the right man and married, but still spent the whole of her working life doing a routine office job. Whilst she carried on working and bring up her family, she never lost her passion for music and attended as many concerts as time and finance would allow.

At the age of 66 years when she retired, she decided to use her pension as a 'student grant' in order to study the composition of music, once more at the Royal Academy in London, and so fulfil a lifetime's ambition. She was a willing student and the 'baby' of the class, whom other students would readily turn to for advice. The third composition she wrote was in fact a major symphony and it was played and praised at the Henry Wood Promenade Concert in 1989, when she had reached the grand old age of 80 years old. As Minna herself said, "When you retire, you can do almost anything you want and I felt as if I was starting my life all over again,. Now I live as if my life stretches before me, and not behind."

This is a story to encourage anyone who feels they have a gift or talent hidden within them, that hasn't had the opportunity to surface for many years. Remember! it's never too late to try something new ...