What talent or skill would you most like to have

I would love to be able to play jazz piano. I can play the piano after a fashion but always have to have music. In my dreams I sometimes find myself playing the most wonderful trad jazz but unfortunately it's not translated into reality. A trip to New Orleans many years ago was absolute bliss. There was an elderly lady who was fantastic and I couldn't take my eyes off her fingers skimming the keys.

I would love to be able to write, novels short stories, but I start and then get stuck, I'm good at making up titles though.

I know what you mean, GoldenGran - I have won a few prizes for poetry, and I can do good descriptions of characters and scenes, but I have found dialogue terribly difficult. I decided that I was never going to be Jane Austen so I gave up trying.

Greatnan, I'd like to be able to write too but have the opposite problem: I can write convincing dialogue but am not great at thinking up good plots which is a considerable drawback. And I can't sing either - would love to be in a big choir blasting out the Hallelujah Chorus or - better still - Belshazzar's Feast. I adore oratorios.

Everyone can sing! - honestly! I work with community non-auditioned choirs and everyone has such fun. Singing is our birthright - we are indoctrinated that you have to be brilliant at something or you shouldn't be doing it - what nonsense!
My wish would be to be able to play the piano well, but.........I play it badly and still enjoy it, so it is worth doing. And I play easy songs for my GC too and they love it - they are a wonderfully uncritical audience - they just get stuck in and enjoy.

My ability to sing - not great in the first place - is compromised by a damaged larynx. Hey-ho!

I'm afraid that I must disagree with Mishap - I can't sing at all, even my children used to ask me to stop . I would dearly love to be able to sing in tune, especially after watching Gareth Malone

I can't sing in tune either - I have had hearing damage in my right ear since I had a bad abcess at age 4 - and my musical sister blames my tone deafness on that. However, I agree that with training and without the memories of being shamed and belittled when forced to sing at school, I might just rise above the hearing disabllity.

Anyway, the skill I would love to have is carpentry - I would love to make things out of wood. Wood carving would be fun too.

Apparently, I really am tone deaf. We used to do verse speaking at school, and the teacher took me on one side and very kindly suggested that I should mime as I was spoiling the effect.
When I sing songs that I have heard a hundred times, my family all say 'That's not the tune, Nan.'
I am a mathematician so I should be able to sing!
However, I sing my heart out in the car.

Tap dancing

I should love to be a bricklayer. I always wanted to build a "barley sugar" twist chimney. Never mind that I suffer from vertigo and could not climb the ladder to do it !

I would love to be able to use a sewing machine and make soft furnishings and curtains but I don't have the patience for all the fiddley bits I can design and colour co-ordinate everything well and know what I want to do but thats as far as it goes,DD can make anything without pattern's just by eye and she spend's many a night making thing's that would cost a fortune in the craft shops,I just wish I had her expertise.

I would love to be able to play a musical instrument. I would also like to know something,anything that my husband doesnt know

I would love to be able to draw and paint water colours skilfully. I get the paint and pencils out every now and then, but get fed up with myself because I don't go beyond a very basic standard, despite practising for hours on end. I've had a few lessons and understand the principles, but there's something lacking that I haven't quite got to grips with. I have a friend who paints beautiful landscapes and close-ups of plants, and keep urging her to have them framed and displayed on the wall, but she says they are not up to her standard!

Yes, you're right Mishap! Singing is a right. Otherwise we wouldn't get the urge to do it when we're happy. Or hum (morosely!) when we are sad. But I still wouldn't inflict mine outside my own family.

I think I would like to be able to 'pot'. Would need to have the wheel in the shed though, or I'd get it over the carpet.

I wouldn't call singing a right, I'd call it an ability that humans have evolved. Some do it better than others but, as mishap says, everyone can get enjoyment out of singing.

Well, there's no law against it missis, so how can it not be a right! [grtin]

effed that up didn't i

I'd love to be able to paint...I can draw (not brilliantly) but enough to get an O level in Art. But to be able to paint a glorious landscape...... My Uncle is an artist and cartoonist but the talent gene didn't get passed on to me.

I'd love to be able to draw and paint – my mother had the gift, so did my sister and so does my daughter, but it missed me out completely. Somehow, the message from the brain gets lost about halfway down my arm. I can work quite happily in 3D. Give me clay, Plasticine or even marzipan and I'll happily create figures of people and animals, but give me a pencil or a paintbrush and I haven't a clue.

Me too Absent....maybe we should take up sculpture instead!

lucid I don't have the biceps for chipping away at marble and, anyway, Mr absent won't let me touch sharp tools.

Why's that *absent have you had a mishap at sometime,*Mr Glamma* will not allow me near a paint brush as one day many yrs ago I painted the kitchen ceiling blue when he was at work

I'd love to be strong enough to use a chainsaw!