When I was working on the staff of Punch magazine, I found myself one day reading an article sent in on spec by Julian Lloyd Webber called Travels With My Cello. It was about the hardships and hazards of taking a cello round the world. It wasn't actually as funny or enlightening as you might hope, so I sent it back to him, saying in my covering letter that he might have something to really grumble about if he played the double bass, as I did.

Not a very gracious rejection note, and Lloyd Webber got his revenge later by publishing a whole book called Travels With My Cello, which I am sure made him a fortune, but I still think I was right. You can carry a cello under your arm, but a double bass is taller than a man, weighs twenty-five pounds and is shaped like a small rowing boat with a long bowsprit. You can see the pity in taxi drivers' eyes as they watch you trying to fit in their cab. You feel the horror as the taxi driver opens his mouth and says one of the following witty things:-

No 1 ‘How do you get it under your chin, then?’

No 2 ‘Bet you wish you'd taken up the flute!’

No 3 ‘Got a lady in there, have you?!’

No 4 ‘On the fiddle, then!’

(The only exception to this was a London taxi driver who looked at me, then at the bass, and then said: ‘I bet you've heard them all, haven't you?’ Him I over-tipped.)

Yes, you have to have a very good reason to want to lug a bass around.

And I did have a good reason. I was trying to give up the trombone. When I first fell in love with jazz as a schoolboy I was playing the piano, and I realised very soon that I was so used to reading music on the piano that I would never learn to improvise on it, so I took up the trombone as well and started a little jazz band at school. I still have a record we made. God, we were awful.

But I also managed to get into a big dance band on second trombone during the holidays, at home in Wrexham. The band was very good and it played for the Saturday night hop at the War Memorial Hall, and this was in the 1950s before rock 'n' roll and before Elvis and people still danced to live music, and there were things called waltzes and foxtrots.

Not that we in the band cared about waltzes and foxtrots.

We just cared about jazz. Not that the dancers cared about jazz. They just cared about dancing. So the band would play two or three Duke Ellington or Stan Kenton arrangements, and the crowd would finally get restive, and we would play some stuff for ballroom dancing, and when they had quietened down we would put some more jazz in and so on.

I discovered one interesting thing in all this, and that was that most dance and jazz musicians do not like dancing and are not good at it. It is almost as if their musical instincts are all in their fingers and not in their feet. People who dance well generally do not play well. I am not a good dancer, so I go along with this theory. Another thing I discovered is that musicians tell a lot of dirty stories. Another thing I discovered is that their wives come along under protest. I remember being forced to dance with the wife of one of the saxophonists one night and as we pirouetted past the bandstand she took me in her arms and gave me a long lingering kiss, one of the first I had ever undergone. Her husband was about ten feet away, deep in his part. I was ten parts terror to one part passion. ‘Your husband'll notice!’ I hissed. ‘No, he won't,’ she said. ‘When he's playing, he only has eyes for his music.’ And it was true.

So I went to Oxford University ostensibly to study French and German, but really to play as much jazz as I could manage. I arrived as a trombonist. Unfortunately, I arrived at the same time as a very good trombonist who got all the jobs. Then one day I heard someone saying, ‘The trouble with the Oxford scene is that there are no bass players. If someone played the bass here he could make a fortune.’

Bingo! In my first long vacation I bought a bass and taught myself to play it. I also by mistake sat on the bow, and broke it, so I have never learnt how to bow the thing, but in jazz you don't need to. Plucking will get you anywhere. In my first bass-playing term I not only got lots of jobs and became in demand, I also got a part as a bass player in a play about jazz and drugs, "The Connection", directed by the young Michael Rudman. I had one line to say: ‘My wife thinks I'm crazy doing this’. I had to say it four times in the play, and I never said it convincingly once. That's because, I now realise, I am not much good in the limelight; I am a good supporting player, which is why the bass is the ideal instrument for me. Apart from having to carry it. I do actually enjoy being in the background in a group, working out the harmonies, pushing the thing along from underneath, being part of the engine. As a writer I suppose I like drawing attention to myself - as a bass player, quite the opposite.

The only snag is having to play next door to a drummer. Drummers are exhibitionists whereas bass players are all sweet-natured quiet people. Drums are louder than the bass, and swallow you up if you are not careful. The ideal group for a bass player to play in is one without drums, and for twenty years I achieved that dream by being the bass player in the cabaret group Instant Sunshine. It was just guitars and bass and very funny songs and larking about, and although the other three never let me sing with the group, I got to do a lot of speaking, introducing the songs and working out a few jokes. It was my apprenticeship to the art of public speaking, which is made much easier if you have a double bass to hide behind.

For twenty years I also reviewed jazz for The Times, and it was a good thing that I didn't play jazz professionally during that time, as anyone I gave a bad review to could justifiably have turned round and said, ‘Who cares what he says when he can't even play properly himself?’. But being in some sort of band, even a cabaret group, was very important to me, as it meant I never gave up music. The world is full of people who say, ‘Oh, I so wish I hadn't given up playing’, and they're right: it's very important to keep in touch with music, especially these days when people think that music is something you store on an iPod and not something you do.

It was even more important for the other three guys in Instant Sunshine. They had started the group as medical students and by now were quite serious doctors and all day long they had to be very serious indeed about illness and dying, so they needed another outlet where they could be silly and irresponsible and sing and play music. For me, the need was different: it was the need to hear laughter. I write humorous stuff every day for a newspaper, and I never hear a reader laugh. On stage with Instant Sunshine, you could hear people laughing most of the time. Sometimes even because of what I said. It was wonderful.

You might think that travelling around the country in the company of three doctors would be the best possible health insurance you could have. Not necessarily. Doctors do not give away trade secrets easily, or free advice, come to that. In any case, they were all from different specialties. Peter, who wrote and sang the songs, was a pediatrician, Alan, the funny one, was in health education and David, who played nifty guitar, was a venereologist. I did once consult them about a passing ailment I had and Peter said vaguely that there was a lot of it about, and Alan said it was about time I gave up smoking, and David said he thought it was syphilis - again. Thanks, lads.

Most of the time they behaved like ordinary human beings, but sometimes they would be doctors together. One of the symptoms of being a doctor is that you suddenly get very nervous about promotion, and money, and job status. Another is that you start taking a morbid interest in other people's health. I remember once we were in a train, going to some concert or other, and one of my fellow musicians discreetly indicated an old lady down the carriage and said: ‘You see the woman with the thyroid condition?’ and the others both said ‘Yes’, and he said, ‘How long do you give her?’ and they had a solemn discussion and thought she had about six months to live, and then went round the rest of the coach commenting on interestingly fatal symptoms, leaving me feeling rather quiet.

We once did a radio show on which one of the guests was a jazz pianist called Eddie Thompson. Eddie was blind, but a wonderful pianist, about whom many stories circulated. My favourite was about the time he was playing in a club with a trio, and there was a lot of talking at the back of the crowd. Some fans of Eddie's were sitting at the front and one of them got annoyed enough to turn round and say ‘Ssssh!’ Eddie Thompson, without looking up from the piano, said: ‘I'm playing as softly as I can!’ But when he played on our show, the doctors said afterwards to each other: ‘Did you see his fingernails?’ and they all said: ‘Yes, a bit grim wasn't it?’ and it turned out that he had rather ominous white marks on his fingernails which betokened some kind of cancer, and less than a year later he had indeed died of some kind of cancer, and I did think that as he was blind they might have told him, but their motto was always not to interfere.

In fact, I happened to be with them the day after Ronald Reagan was shot by a would-be assassin, and I can remember even now the headline in the paper: "REAGAN SHOT AND RUSHED TO HOSPITAL" because Peter grimaced and said, ‘That's bad’, and I said, ‘Being shot, you mean?’ and he said: ‘No, being rushed to hospital. Don't forget, Miles, that hospital is where all the nasty things happen. It's where all the ill people and all the germs are. It's where the people who cause illness are. They're called doctors. If you're ever shot by a would-be assassin, Miles, just stay where you are and don't let them move you.’ And I never have.

The only time they might have been of any real use was on the one occasion we flew to America, and the announcement came over the PA, ‘This is your captain speaking - if there is a physician on board, could he make himself known to the cabin crew? We have an ill person on the flight. It's not an emergency, but if you could hurry... ' and I turned round to my three doctors, and they had all hidden behind their seats.

‘Come on, lads,’ I said. ‘It's your big chance!’

They grumbled that they were off duty... that it was an American plane and they didn't want to get involved in a malpractice suit... but finally one of them went to offer assistance. He came back ten minutes later.

‘Well?’ I said eagerly.

‘Oh, it was a child, having a little fit,’ he said.

‘What kind of fit?’

‘I'm not sure,’ he said. ‘An American rheumatologist got there first.’

‘And what did he diagnose?’

‘Rheumatism, of course!’

It was at that point I was glad that our man hadn't got there first, because he was the venereologist.

Well, fifteen years ago I moved out of London, and left the group behind, and I rather thought my playing days were over, except for my very private and slapdash piano renditions of the classics, but one day at a party in Bath I was approached by a man who said he had heard I was a bass player and was I interested in joining them. Them? Who was them? Well, he said, he had been in the Navy till recently, and he and his mates had run a jazz band there, and now they had all left the Navy but they still enjoyed keeping the band going. Unfortunately, they had lost their bass player (he made it sound like an accident at sea) and now they needed another one. Here was his card if I was interested... and he handed me a card which read: ‘Rear-Admiral Sir Robert Hill, RN retired... banjo, guitar...' and the long and short of it is that I still play now and then in a band of, mostly, naval types who used to command submarines and destroyers and now happily steer their instruments to village halls in the West Country where we play old-fashioned jazz for old-fashioned knees-up, and at its best it sounds damned good. Sometimes, when it's dark, and there's a nice fire going at home, I groan at the thought of driving forty miles to play with aching fingers, but my wife always says: ‘Go and do it - you know you always enjoy it!’ and I go and do it and I always enjoy it.

A couple of months ago we played for a 60th birthday party in the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovilton near Yeovil, and I didn't feel much like playing when I arrived, but as we took up our positions underneath a complete Concorde aeroplane, and swung into the first number, I thought, as I always do, how glad I am I didn't give up, and that if I had given up, I would never have experienced first hand the acoustical advantages of playing directly beneath the world's fastest airliner.

I sometimes still wish I played something smaller than a double bass, but not for long. I once met the virtuoso classical American bass player Gray Karr, and asked him if he thought as I did that bass players tend to be quiet, happy, philosophical people. Oh, yes, he said, and he knew why; it was because we were so sensually satisfied. Sensually satisfied? I raised my eyebrows. Sure, he said. It's the only instrument where the player presses himself against it as he plays and feels the vibrations go through his body. Very sensual. You can feel everything. And you can hear it through your body, he said. That's why deaf people can learn the bass. Deaf? I said. Sure, he said - he had taught several deaf people to play. Were they any good? I asked doubtfully. One of them is playing in the Chicago Symphony right now, he said.

So there you have it. Take up the bass if you want to be a selfless team member, a better public speaker and a sensually satisfied citizen, or if you're just deaf. I only wish it was a more convenient shape, that's all.

Radio 4 2002