2 1GT RM Wednesday November 18 2020 | the times

times

Hilary Rose

The games

families

play

Jenga has been

inducted into the US

National Toy Hall of

Fame, where it will

join Monopoly, that

well-known scourge

of family harmony.

What puzzles me is

why, if it’s so good —

or indeed bad, like

Monopoly — I’ve never

played it. Why do some

games make it into a

family’s repertoire and

others don’t?

The Queen’s Gambit

has sent sales of

chessboards into orbit,

but we could never sit

still for long enough.

I’ve never met anyone,

apart from me, who

has played Sorry!, let

alone enjoyed it. Every

family in the land

played Twister, apart

from the Roses, and

no other family weans

its young on a card

game called

Newmarket.

It’s not us, though,

definitely not. It’s you.

T

wo weeks from today

is December 2, when

the latest lockdown is

scheduled to end and

I, for one, am bouncing

up and down like

Tigger — 2020 has

tried to break my

spirit, and it has failed. I imagine that

new rules, old rules or some sort of

tweaked half-arsed rules will still

apply, but at the moment it looks as if

I can book dinner in a restaurant and

go round for Sunday lunch to friends’

houses, plus it’s December.

Even the biggest curmudgeon, in

this most rubbish of years, can give

a weak “yay” for December, right? I’ve

got my pine-scented Christmas candle

lined up, my two baubles ready for

each end of the mantelpiece and, who

knows, maybe this will be the year for

multicoloured flashing lights and

a sleigh on the roof. Santa Claus is

definitely coming to my part of town

and I can’t wait to have some

semblance of a Covid-secure social

life back again. Then a married

friend punctured my bubble.

“The idea of meeting other

people, let alone having them

round, seems so odd now,” she

said. “It’s like it belongs to

a different life.”

Dear God, has it come

to this? I’m relatively

young and healthy and

intensely sociable. Far

more worrying to

me than Covid is the

fear that people are

forgetting how to socialise.

The muscle they used to

arrange dinners and

drinks has withered

and died through

lack of use. In the

spring lockdown

everyone could

get right behind

rosé in the

park. Now

that it’s cold,

dark and wet

they are

retreating

into their

family units and

not coming out till spring.

Who can blame them? That’s

what the government has

told us to do for most of the

Big spiders,

no conkers

— oh heck!

One of the reasons

I’m so keen to leave

the house is because

’tis the season for

spiders. It is true

that I’m prone to

exaggeration when

it comes to spiders,

but they do seem

particularly enormous

this year.

After a grim night

grappling with a

tarantula high up on

the ceiling, I called my

mother for sympathy.

“They come in at this

time of year to find

a mate,” she said.

“There’ll be another

one somewhere.”

The problem is

clearly that my anti-

spider defences —

conkers — need

refreshing, so I headed

for the park. “There

aren’t any,” said

the mother of a

disconsolate toddler.

“There’s some sort of

conker blight this year,

I just googled it.”

No conkers in 2020,

but XL spiders? Help.

Carol Midgley is away

year and it’s undoubtedly still safer

than the Northern Line in rush hour.

So the colleague I used to have

a regular drink with one night after

work no longer comes into the office.

He festers at home and wonders why

he’s bored and lonely. The friend who

used to commute from the home

counties no longer bothers. She frets

that the trains will be toxic.

“I’ve forgotten how to have a social

life,” another said. “I’ve spent so long

this year not looking at my diary at all,

because there was nothing in it and

nowhere to go, that now I’ve got out

of the habit altogether. The idea of

calling a mate and saying, ‘Fancy

a pint on Friday night?’ seems

weird. Besides, who knows if

we’ll still be allowed to have a

pint by Friday night anyway?”

Look, I’m not a complete

saddo. I’ve already got three

dinners, a Saturday lunch and

a date booked in for the days

after December 2. It’s just

that the pool of available

people to socialise with

seems to have shrunk

alarmingly. Even

those who are

up for it are

surprised

at my

enthusiasm. “Christmas

is cancelled,” they

whinge, “so why

pretend otherwise?”

What sort of an

argument is that?

“Let’s be miserable

for ever just

because”? Maybe it

is and maybe it isn’t,

but we’ll figure

something out and

there’s always next

year. If you have some

lights and a sleigh going

spare, you know

who to call.

Only two weeks until I

can socialise again. Will

any friends join me?

Watch out —

After getting her first drum kit aged five,

Nandi Bushell, ten, tells Will Hodgkinson

about how she played with Lenny

Kravitz and outdrummed Dave Grohl

S

he played drums with

Lenny Kravitz at the

O2 Arena in London.

Dua Lipa invited her

on tour after the two

of them appeared on

a Scandinavian talk show.

Tom Morello of Rage

Against the Machine sent her a guitar.

Videos of her drumming along to

rock classics such as Led Zeppelin’s

Good Times, Bad Times and Nirvana’s

In Bloom have had millions of views.

And now Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters,

having fought and lost a drum battle

with her, has asked Nandi Bushell

from Ipswich to join him on stage

when the heavy rock band return to

Britain next year. “But it has to be at

the end of the set,” Grohl pointed out.

“Because you’re gonna steal the show.”

It’s an impressive roll call for

any would-be rock’n’roller. For

a ten-year-old who has to balance

drumming wizardry with such

everyday concerns as school,

homework and being in bed by

nine o’clock, it is nothing less

than remarkable.

“I did really well in a maths club

when I was five, and as a reward I

went to the toy shop and got a toy

drum kit,” Nandi says of how she

began her journey towards becoming

the next Keith Moon. With a red

and black shirt and hair in bunches,

she certainly looks like a normal

ten-year-old girl. “Me and my dad

started jamming together. Then we

took it to the next level.”

Sitting next to Nandi on the living-

room sofa, a wall of black and white

photographs of favourite musicians

such as Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix

behind them, is her father, John

Bushell. He’s a software engineer

who played in bands in his twenties,

although by his admission neither he

nor his South African wife, Lungi,

can claim responsibility for their

daughter’s prodigious talent. He traces

it back to a Saturday morning ritual

of making pancakes and listening

to Beatles records when she was

a toddler, during which Nandi would

focus on Ringo Starr’s drumming

because it made her feel, as she puts

it, “happy and in the groove”.

“I have a massive passion for music,

but I’m not a musician,” John says.

“I didn’t have the sticking power for it.

And I certainly didn’t coerce Nandi

into taking up drums, because my first

thought was, ‘That’s going to be loud.’

But when we got the drum kit home

I’d put on a record and she’d play

along to it in time. She had perfect

rhythm from the start.”

Grohl, who has written a theme

song for Nandi featuring his teenage

daughters on backing vocals, says the

drum battle dented his confidence.

“I quit playing drums because

I realised I’ll never be as good as you,”

he told her over a Zoom call. “Well,

just practise, practise, practise,” came

the sage advice from someone who

this year reached grade seven in

music theory.

There is a video from 2019 of

nine-year-old Nandi playing along

with her dad to Seven Nation Army

by the White Stripes. He puts in an

admirable effort, but there’s no

question about who the star of the

show is. “Seven Nation Army is one of

the first things you learn as a guitarist

that sounds awesome, so we started

with that,” John says. “Then I heard

about a jam night in Ipswich, and

Nandi was playing alongside adults

from the age of six onwards. I think

that’s where a lot of her confidence

comes from.”

One of the great joys of Nandi’s

videos, beyond her astonishing ability,

is her abandon. She screams, gurns,

throws her drumsticks in the air and

generally loses it to the power of rock.

She doesn’t appear to be shy or self-

conscious in the slightest. Even when

she travelled to Los Angeles to appear

on Ellen Degeneres’s talk show last

year, she chatted away happily about

going on a rollercoaster for the first

time before wowing the studio

audience with a bravura drum solo.

Rather than coming across like a child

star who acts like an adult, she’s more

like a kid in a grown-up world. Does

she ever get nervous? “Only when

I go on death slides.”

How, then, did an everyday girl from

Ipswich gain the attention of all these

musical superstars? It began when,

aged eight, Nandi took it upon herself

to learn Clyde Stubblefield’s drum

break in James Brown’s Funky

Drummer and posted the results

on Instagram. It was spotted by

Questlove, the drummer with the live

hip-hop band the Roots, even though

Nandi only had about a hundred

followers at the time.

“He saw great potential in Nandi,”

her father says. “He said that she was

playing a drum kit that was too big for

her, so he sent her a smaller kit that

she has been using ever since.”

Not long after that, the American

soul singer Anderson Paak picked

up on a video of Nandi playing along

to Use Me by Bill Withers and shared

it on his Instagram page. Then in

2019 Kravitz invited Nandi to jam

at the O2 after witnessing her mastery

of his 1993 hit Are You Gonna Go

My Way.

“And that is when I realised that

things were quite special,” her father

says. “She was able to go on stage with

all of these seasoned musicians. Nandi

was playing the Bernard Purdie shuffle

[the signature style of the soul/jazz

drummer], Lenny Kravitz grabbed a

bass and played along, and it was like

he was a fan of hers — he was in awe

of her. I thought, ‘This is incredible.’ ”

I wonder if there are any secrets or

shortcuts to becoming a drummer of

Nandi’s magnitude. “You’re not going

to get it straight away, so don’t be

Now that it’s cold,

dark and wet they

are not coming

out till spring

sm

b

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