I am in the pleasing chaos of Dots music shop in Camden Town with the three-quarter-sized violin I had as a child. I found the violin deep under the stairs; the case had shredded its black leather into dust. It did not bode well. Unopened for 20 years, the green felt case lining bloomed white mould and the violin’s strings had pinged like stray grey hairs. “But the wooden body looks intact, doesn’t it?” I say to the lady in Dots, who backs away from the blast of spores as I open up. And a Stradivarius lasts hundreds of years so…

I’m hoping they can re-string it for my daughter – who has grown out of the cracker-trinket-sized violin she started on – thus saving me £100. Dots’ matriarch shakes her head. She points out kindly that this is a “school” violin (ie, crap) and its glue has rotted, its arches have collapsed and its black horsehair bow is lank. An estimate will be made, but she holds out little hope.

Never mind. For the moment I rent a bigger violin for a tenner a month, and await the prognosis. The violin is in a huge red case with hiking straps. “Wear it on your back and everyone will think you’re a professional,” say the Dots staff, and I wonder why. But as I head into the bank to sort a financial glitch (a mere trifle compared to this harebrained bank’s own global financial glitches), the under-manager’s eyes light up. He speeds me through the queue, commandeers an office and asks me about my musical career. I respond vaguely. He waxes nostalgically about his own classical music past. My finances are suddenly all in harmony.

In the coffee shop queue, people immediately strike up conversations: “Is that a violin or a viola in there?” And when I go to buy a weird Goth hoodie for my goddaughter in Camden Market, the stallholder asks me if I want to try it on. “It’s a present,” I sniff, and add inwardly, “Can’t you see I’m a nagging, ancient mother-of-three on an errand?” But of course it’s the violin: it is code for a different sort of person – artistic, freethinking, single. A wearer of Goth tops, not a person with lice shampoo in her handbag. “Where are you playing tonight?” asks the stallholder, smiling.

I now feel all single women should carry an empty violin case if it has this effect. For a single man, a puppy has a similarly safe conversation-opening effect in the park. But the violin has other joys: at 6pm during the rush hour at Euston Tube, it comes in really useful for ramming tourists standing on the wrong side of the escalator.

Aren’t musical instruments great, I think, and then I remember just how much I loathed every grinding, scraping moment of those six years of tuition. It felt like flailing your own skin off – and led absolutely nowhere. When I heard the call to half-hour practice – from helpless parents who couldn’t read music – I felt physically sick, and learned the word “psychosomatic”. I went from being crotchety, to quavering, to openly weeping. I also swore profusely at a precociously young age, and my scales got worse each week. Which was rather trying on Saturdays for Mr McTaggart, my teacher, who looked like an extra from Starsky and Hutch and had a convertible orange MG sports car with a tiny back seat along which lay his treasured violin.

There were also the joys of the youth orchestra. Since I couldn’t keep up, I gently sawed silently on the wood so my bow rose in sequence with the rest of the second violins. (If only there had been third violins, I feel I would have flourished.)

At 12, I quit, ostensibly to play hockey, but a year later I got an under-age Saturday job in a shoe shop, and I have loved shoes ever since. I cannot say the same for the violin. But ask any group of middle-class people, and they will say: “God, yes, I gave up the clarinet/trumpet/piano after primary school and I’ve never touched it since. My parents said I’d regret it for ever, but I don’t.” There are trillions of pounds in wasted children’s music lessons out there, enough to rescue a couple of banks.

Friends also like to reminisce about the horror of the music-practice fights. Those who were bribed with 10p a session seem to bear fewer emotional scars. Very few remember their early musical career with joy – my husband was joyous when he broke his little finger and had to give up the cello.

So, hold on, why am I doing this to my daughter? As an abused violinist, repeating the pattern? But she seems to like it, and rarely weeps as she plays The Wombles theme tune or The Birdie Song. Still, I promise to remember that quitting can be healthy. We are not all musical prodigies.

kate.muir@thetimes.co.uk

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