Sonata for mum and toddler in B minor

I played the piano for about four years when I was in my teens, then again for the same duration in my late twenties, before I had children. Now the time had come to return to the piano stool. "You'll find the time," people say, and you believe them.

Then, because you like to think of yourself as an achiever, you imagine that you would quite like to accomplish some evidence of your new talent. So you say to your piano teacher: "Go on then, if I were to take a grade, what grade would it be?" And he, probably not thinking it through, perhaps wanting to flatter you a little, says: "Oh, about grade 5." Even though in reality you are only about grade 2.

But your daughter is about to take grade 3, and she is only eight, so you have to start at a level higher than her. Grade 5 sounds good. I recently read a piece about David Suchet, the actor, which casually mentioned he had got grade 5 clarinet. As an adult. Impressive, no?

Musical exams would seem to be every bit as popular these days as they were when I was young. Last year 285,545 people took Associated Board exams, grades 1-8, compared with 268,170 in 2001. Plus, there are of course the Trinity exams.

Trinity examines 500,000 people worldwide every year. But most of them are children; only 6% of Trinity candidates are over 18. (Indeed, maybe I should have gone for Trinity, since it has a choice of exams, one of which leaves out scales altogether to concentrate on "performance", as if you are a real concert pianist.)

However, via a combination of vanity, curiosity and David Suchet-influ-ence, I now find myself in the slightly surreal position of preparing for the 2007-8 Associated Board piano exam, grade 5.

Some of the exam material covertly acknowledges that the whole grade notion is a foolish construct. My sight-reading book (don't ask) has a great big statement that reads, "Oh no! Not the sight-reading test!", before reas-suringly stating: "It's really not so difficult after all!" Only it is. Particularly if you can only practise, in truth, about two times a week.

And so, what am I faced with? First, a rather jolly Mozart Andante in B flat, K15ii, which a friend of mine Adam Baxter (39), also mad enough to be essaying grade 5, told me was "p*** easy". Last year Baxter scraped through grade 4. It wasn't a happy event, he tells me.

"It was awful. I had the sense that at every part I goofed. The only thing I knew worked was the sight reading. Throughout, I was like a caged animal. But I enjoy pushing myself, measuring myself against the standard. And, you know, when you tell people, they are very impressed, particularly if they don't know much about music."

The very low Köchel number in the title will indicate to Mozart lovers that this is a piece of juvenilia. Indeed, a footnote in my Exam Pieces book tells me it was drawn from the so-called London Notebook, "a collection of pieces composed by Mozart at the age of eight". This, dear reader, is the type of undermining footnote expressly designed to make the grade 5 pupil feel rather hapless.

And so onto piece No 2, the Romantic piece. Having abandoned an impossible Schumann waltz, I am now in the foothills of Romance No 10 by Carl Reinecke. This is rather dreamy, and needs pedal and lots of yearning lurve. Bars 34-41 are still a bit ahem, but as soon as we get back onto the main tune I'm fine. "Just think about the rhythm," says my little sister. Who got distinction in grade 8 at the age of 35. I'd like to think we Millards are late (but great) keyboard practitioners.

I was inspired to take up the piano again after Radio 3 broadcast the entire oeuvre of JS Bach. Hearing Bach's peerless keyboard works made me long to play some of them.

John Reid, my teacher, was an internet discovery. As a young, rather elegant, concert pianist whose recitals this year have included appearances at Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room, I really don't know what he is doing with me as his pupil. At my first lesson I was so nervous I insisted he hide in the curtain while I played (or rather fumbled) at a Bach prelude.

He was very polite, although I suspect he never thought his career might encompass listening to a sweaty fortysomething destroying Bach's masterly counterpoint. "Don't worry," he told me in a muffled voice from the safety of the curtain, "I teach lots of neurotic adults."

Neurosis, and sweat. It's the inescapable truth of adult learning. Children have no fear. They just breeze through their pieces, stumble a bit, and continue on their way unflustered. Whereas adults have so much fear that a tiny stumble will cause them to lose their place, go into a cold sweat, beg to start again and generally make a mountain out of a missed E flat.

Then there's the memory issue.

Playing music when you are an adult is meant to do wonders for the speed of your brain. Frankly, I wonder when that kicks in. At the moment I am having difficulty in memorising the arpeggio of C major, let alone 23 other arpeggios which I must master. Let alone the 33 scales. Whereas my daughter is cantering through grade 4 at such a rate that she will have overtaken me before I've even sent off the grade 5 application form. As well as grade 4 piano, my eldest daughter is at grade 2 cello, and my older son is also on grade 2 violin.

It's all right if you are a child. Children, you see, have parents. Who bully you, and bribe you, and carve out practising time, and write all your scales and arpeggios on little itty-bitty pieces of paper, then pop them all into a fun lucky dip.

I don't have any of this. Getting to the piano in my case depends wholly on self-motivation, in conjunction with a slim window of opportunity that occasionally arises after completing my own work but prior to the baby's bath. This space is usually about 15 minutes long, after which a clean, powdered baby will appear and devastate my practising by expertly pulling all my sheet music onto the floor and yelling.

Of course, my piano playing is nothing but a hobby. It makes my daughter feel quite coolly superior. Equally it makes me understand what she is going through, and appreciate how exacting it all is. I'm not breathing down my sister's neck; I know that grade 8 is completely beyond the scope of my ambition. I don't see myself playing at Wigmore Hall any more than I see myself playing at Lord's.

But thanks to my self-inflicted goal, I now very much want to master F minor and play Mozart's andante with grace and ease, and knock off a few lines of sight reading. I actively yearn for the torment of grade 5, as it will judge me on a skill that has no relevance to the skills relevant to my paid work.

I want to see if my brain is up to remembering 34 arpeggios and, more interestingly, whether my nerves can cope with the torture of "chromatic scale; hands separately and together, an octave apart, on any note named by the examiner".

I want to be judged excellent, because in its archaic way, grade 5 is a good old fashioned hurdle that I have (probably very stupidly) set up for myself and now have to pull off. Naturally, I blame David Suchet.