Making Matters: A cautionary tale for our times

Last October I received a text message from a friend that contained a rather disturbing photo of a cello with badly damaged varnish. My initial response to the damage I saw was ‘Whoa – I don’t want anything to do with sorting that out!’ As it turned out, I knew the cello and its owner quite well and for a number of reasons I couldn’t help becoming involved. It transpired that during a rehearsal, while the cello was sitting on the floor, a fellow musician had unknowingly bumped a bottle of hand sanitiser on a nearby table. Somehow the sanitiser splattered on to the front of the cello, making a large area of the lower bout resemble something from a crime scene. When the cellist returned minutes later, he noticed all the white marks on the cello and realised what had happened…