I had my third drumming lesson on the same day as reading what Swedish researchers had revealed. Those who can keep time while banging a stick on a table perform better at intelligence tests than those who can't. In other words, drummers are brainy, which means Ringo Starr and Animal from the Muppets must be in line for an apology from the entire non-drumming world - and I now have a cast-iron explanation for having spent my life playing chopsticks (as opposed to Chopsticks) on the worktop.
The discovery that rhythm and brains are connected can't be that much of a surprise to those blessed with the gift of keeping time for the duration of a song; it requires prolonged concentration and sharpness, and there is a maths-like quality to syncopation and maintaining complicated time signatures. Listening to the propulsive Motorik drive of 70s German band Neu!, the extraordinary speed and precision of jazz drummer Art Blakey, or Steve Reich's mesmerising intricacies can feel like climbing into, and getting willingly lost in, an MC Escher print.
Drums, like the heads of numbnut world leaders and climate-change deniers, are there to be pummelled with precision and controlled force. Imagining that your snare drum or floor tom is the head of a numbnut world leader or climate-change denier helps with technique - though naturally, being of above average intelligence, you regard anthropomorphism as infantile.
Drumming is the perfect exposition of mind and body in tandem, and before I get a call from Pseuds Corner, I should like to add that absorbing yourself in a rhythm is so enjoyable, so purely uplifting, that everyone should do it. What's the point of a rock or pop song if it doesn't have a skin-tight rhythm section pinning your feet to the floor and willing you to clap hands on the off-beat? Go on, do it now! Feels good, doesn't it?
Richard Sennett's recent book, The Craftsman, includes reflections on his mastery of the cello - which he achieved to a professional standard before a wrist injury led him, not wholly improbably, to sociology. He reminds us that the practice of any skill will enrich and enliven the brain and, in so doing, nourish our capacity to get the most out of life. "The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve," he writes, "but the emotional payoff is one's experience of doing it again. There's nothing strange about this experience. We all know it: it is rhythm."
I've heard those final three words before, albeit in a different order. A few years ago Simon Rattle led the Berlin Philharmonic and a hundred or so Berlin schoolchildren in an inspired, dance-enacted performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. The film of the concert, and of the students' months of rehearsal, was titled Rhythm is It!. And it is. It ought to go without saying that everyone, but everyone, should have the chance to learn a musical instrument, no matter how noisy, difficult or expensive, from the moment they start school.
Here's one reason why. Since taking up drum lessons a couple of months ago, I've got a spring in my step that can only come from saying to hell with it and doing something purely for its own sake. I'm also more alert, more energetic and, to be honest, almost pathetically glad to be living the dream at last. No amount of citizenship or positive-psychology lessons could have done that to my tender teenage head.
Sennett's book reminds anyone who reads it that you have all the more power to shape your life - to live intelligently might be another way of putting it - if opportunities to acquire meaningful skills, and to practice them, are readily available. If more members of the cabinet were to take heed, I might take their grinning mushes off my snare.
