At aiwendel's birthday party on Saturday there was a considerable amount of impromptu music-making. In particular, there were spare violins lying around, and I picked one up and had a go on it.

I played the violin seriously when I was a child. I started at age seven or thereabouts, was very lucky in the availability of good teachers, and by the time I was about fifteen I'd got pretty good at it: they told me I was well beyond Grade 8 standard, though for reasons I don't recall the only exam I'd ever actually taken was Grade 7 some years earlier. Then I gave up, mostly on the grounds that I was getting tired of the constant pressure from teachers to put more of my time and effort into it so I could reach a really high standard: I had lots of other things I wanted to do with my time and effort too, and had more or less decided by that point that my future lay in computers rather than violin-playing.

I maintained an interest in general musicianship, dabbling with keyboards and guitar and sporadically trying my hand at composition, but I never really regretted giving up the violin. A few years later, when I had a brush with RSI, it struck me as significant that my left wrist had a lot more trouble than my right: that's the one that curls round at a really silly angle when playing the violin, and it seemed likely to me that this wasn't coincidence. I've often suspected that if I'd kept the violin up, my left wrist would really be in trouble now, whereas in fact I recovered from the RSI (eventually) and now only have to take normal sorts of precautions.

Since then I've occasionally been tempted into having a go on someone else's violin when one was lying around. The last time I tried was around 2004 or so, if I remember rightly, and I remember finding it strangely incongruous that my right hand could still pretty much remember how to do the bowing, but my left hand no longer naturally formed the alternating short-long finger spacing needed to play a violin in tune, because dabbling with a guitar in the meantime had retrained it to space the fingers evenly instead. Also, after ten or twenty minutes of trying, I found my left wrist ached for the next day or so, reinforcing my belief that it wouldn't have stood up to the strain if I'd kept playing seriously.

So when I had another opportunity on Saturday I was rather more reluctant to even try. However, against my better judgment and after some egging-on from bystanders (and also, probably not insignificantly, after some alcohol), I had a go anyway.

My initial attempts were just embarrassing. My left hand had all the problems I remembered from my last attempt, but now my right hand had forgotten how to bow competently too. Nobody else seemed to complain, for some bizarre reason, but I knew it was out of tune, scratchy and clumsy. The trouble with doing things at which you're hopelessly out of practice but used to be really good is that your standards tend not to have dropped in line with your skill, so I could still remember what good violin-playing a foot from my left ear was supposed to sound like and I knew for a fact that this was so far from it as to be unrecognisable. I could hardly get through a bar or two of anything without coming close to putting the instrument down in disgust.

Later in the evening, though, I found a lot of it coming back to me – not only the bow movements but even some mostly-in-tune fingering. What seemed to help was not trying to play things I remembered being able to play in the past, because all the pieces I remembered best were the excessively fast, twiddly and difficult ones I used to enjoy most; instead I concentrated on playing the simpler music that other people were noodling about with. In particular, I found, one thing I hadn't forgotten was the knack of translating from a tune imagined in my head directly into finger and bow movements in real time; I was able to play along with a lot of stuff people were singing without even having to look at a sheet of music, just by remembering what the tune was supposed to sound like and letting my fingers do what seemed natural. Sight-reading the actual music, for tunes I didn't already know, was harder, but I found I could make a decent stab at a previously unknown piece given five minutes to run through it a few times. By the end of the evening I'd entirely got over the initial embarrassment and was starting to take a bit of pride in a well-executed bar or two – and, more importantly, I had remembered that doing this stuff could be fun.

The next morning, however, all the embarrassment came back. I don't often get that ‘oh god, what did I do last night?’ feeling after parties, but yesterday morning I suddenly felt as if I'd made a huge, attention-seeking prat of myself for the entire evening by pretending to violin-playing skill in public.

On the other hand, curiously, my left wrist felt fine this time (though my right shoulder was killing me for most of yesterday, but that seems less likely to be caused by violin-playing – I probably just slept funny). So now yesterday's retrospective embarrassment has worn off a bit, I feel almost tempted to scrounge a cheap violin from somewhere and have another try at it in the privacy of my own home (and then perhaps risk exposing other people to it again after I've practised a bit).

I suspect it's probably still a bad idea, on balance: just because I didn't manage to hurt my wrist noticeably in one evening doesn't mean I wouldn't still do it cumulative damage if I kept it up for longer, and really, I do depend on my wrists…