It was the height of the tech boom. 1999. A close friend of mine, maybe the person I care more for than anyone I know, had hit it big. He’s a modest man, not given to self-aggrandisement. But he had had a tough childhood, he had married the woman of his dreams relatively late in life and he had had made a son of whom he was justly proud, even though the making had come rather late.

So for the first time, he had said ‘What the heck!. I’m going to get a beautiful place, the better to see the wife and child grow’. And because the wife, at her not-so-tender age had expressed an interest in the piano, something very close to my friend’s heart, why, he went out and got her the very best he could afford, to be installed in the place of honor in his splendid, new estate in America’s most hallowed zip code. Not only was this piano imported directly from Germany but it came replete with the maker’s signature, no less.

I will never forget the look of sheer delight on his face the day it arrived. ‘Thomas’ he called excitedly, ‘You have got to see this thing’. Now while my friend was endowed with something akin to perfect pitch, he couldn’t play a note if you paid him. But he knew the instrument of his choice was capable of great things. Indeed, the sound was beyond compare. My friend had invited a classical pianist to put the instrument through its paces and some four of Chopin’s Nocturnes later you new that heaven was close indeed.

For a while there after that magical evening I lost track of him and his wife, the pianist in the making. He survived the fallout in the markets in 2000, moved on to better things and took the wife with him. Then we happened to bump into one another again and wiled away a pleasant evening over a couple of bottles of Napa’s finest with the food prepared just so.

“She cannot play to save her life”, he said, once well into his cups. “Come now”, I responded, “let’s not be so cruel. After all, you cannot fault the effort she puts into the thing”. For try she did. Twice weekly lessons, endless practice, scores by the….well…score. If effort correlated with results, the woman would have surpassed Horowitz. Sadly, she was proof of just one more example that you cannot put in what God leaves out, and that fateful evening, my friend had realized the truth of the matter, cruel as it may be. His piano was nothing more than a piece of beautiful furniture. It was a Leica in a glass case. There to be admired, but if the aesthetic senses of the world were to be saved, never to be used.

So is it enough if you just enjoy it? Does it matter that you have spent the earth and accomplished nothing except, maybe, a blip on the manufacturer’s bottom line. Do you grin and bear it and say, well, I tried?

The economic reality, of course, is that without consumers like my friend there would be no economy. Ferrari owners who cannot drive. Steinway owners who cannot play. And Leica owners who cannot take a photograph. But it is not fair to denigrate these folks. They are, after all, a source of cheap supply of the world’s finest equipment to those of us who dare not, or cannot, buy it new.