The Law Collection™ story begins in 2009. An eleven-year-old Matthew had been playing piano for three years, following in the footsteps (fingersteps?) of Great Grandad Reg. Also following Grandad Reg was nine-year-old Allie (the Artist Formerly Known As James) who, as Reg had done, was learning the clarinet. I (Matthew) had been learning on the piano passed down from Grandad Reg (as I continued to do for a decade to come), and in 2009 we found some floppy disks(!) with old recordings of Grandad playing. By playing these through the piano and then externally recording the piano's output to a laptop, we were able to produce a CD of (previously unheard!) recordings of his playing for the family. While looking through these recordings, we also noticed a few that I had recorded a couple of years earlier, including some Grade 1 pieces (like Banges Herzelein and Allegro). Somewhere along the line, the idea was had that we could produce a DVD containing these recordings, in addition to new video recordings of the best piano and/or clarinet performances we could muster. Thus was born the Law Collection, or as it was at the time, "The Best of M & J Vol.1".

By 2010 any previous sibling co-operation or co-production had gone, and "The Best of M & J" became "The Matthew Law Music Collection". A gap in the school's Junior Orchestra led my music teacher to suggest that I start learning the euphonium (it's like a tuba but smaller), which I enthusiastically did in September 2010, just in time to give everyone a taste of what a painful-sounding idea it was at Christmas.

By 2011 the now-annual DVD had morphed into an activity by which—lacking any immediate schoolwork deadlines—I could spend the entire week manifesting my potent mix of perfectionism and last-minute-ism, resulting on an ever increasing amount of time being spent designing the DVD's cover and an ever diminishing amount of time being spent polishing the pieces, whose quality was questionable at best. The DVD's cover (inexplicably labelled '2012') is a take-off of that of one of my piano books at the time, a reference which I spent far too much time finding the perfect fonts for given that I doubt anyone else got it.

The only copy of the cover of 2012's DVD I can find is that posted by Auntie Karen to Facebook, since (perhaps in the interest of my trademark last-minute-ism) the cover was designed by hand and then photocopied. This hand-drawn/handwritten aesthetic was matched in the videos, which were titled with a font made from my handwriting. For the first time, some of the performances were on a piano other than that bequeathed by Grandad Reg: one December afternoon I went into the school where Dad attempts to teach, and used their Very Nice and Very Expensive grand piano. 2012 marked the year I moved on from my first piano teacher (who was actually a violinist and so had come to the conclusion that by that point she had taught me all she knew about playing the piano), to my second, a music teacher at Dad's school. By my calculations, it was also around this time that I first played at church (or maybe summer youth camp?), since 2012 sees the first appearance of Christian worship songs on the DVDs.

The cover of 2013's DVD (by this point "The Fifth Annual Matthew Law Music Collection") was minimalistic because my chronic last-minute-ism meant that it had no choice but to be. On the back, a poem (a pastiche of one found in a beloved Christmas children's book since lost to a second hand store) acknowledges the unremitting last-minute-ness of the production, the description of overnight DVD production not being an exaggeration.

As can be seen in the "Making Of" video , 2014's edition of the DVD was filmed almost immediately before I performed in the Church's nativity service: as opportunistic and content-hungry as ever, I swiftly co-opted them to be included in the DVD. The Making Of also documents the now-normal practice of staying awake all night in order to complete the DVD, the logical ultimate conclusion of the ever-present last-minute-ism. I'd like to say that I have reformed my childish ways and seen the light of perfectly planned present production, but as I write this it is currently 3am on Christmas Eve… 🙃

The year started out well – I was doing well at sixth form, where I had good friends and a French exchange student who introduced me to some cool French synthpop, but at some point it turned out that applying the same last-minute all-nighter workflow to each piece of work I had was not the best recipe for productivity, nor for that matter for avoiding going "a bit mad". Given the stresses of the year, I opted to—for the first time since 2008—not produce a DVD, but a couple of days before Christmas the pull of Christmas tradition became irresistible and I ended up recording whatever I could muster and uploading them straight from my phone to YouTube in time for a link to the playlist in cards (or maybe some tasteful origami) on Christmas day. Having stopped piano lessons (and indeed for a period pretty much everything else in life), the formally-taught Allegros , Allegrettos , and Allegrissimos of previous years were replaced by a self-taught (read: badly-sightread) medley of whatever I happened to be listening to at the time.

I haven't dwelled on it above (I figured it might get a bit repetitive), but throughout my aforementioned long and illustrious piano-playing career, I had been steadily working my way through the graded exams, which culminate in Grade Eight (which Uncle Simon had never reached when he was learning piano as a boy…). In 2016, having returned from the hiatus from formal piano lessons, I successfully reached that level, qualifying me as *checks notes* the World's Best Piano Player. Unlike in previous years, when everyone had known about the exam beforehand, I had intentionally kept the Grade Eight under wraps from grandparents, aunt, uncles, and all other members of the vast Matthew Law fanbase (most of whom I assume were secretly hoping dreading the hiatus would be permanent). The certificate on the back wasn't just boasting, then – it was the means through which extended family and assorted well-wishers were informed of my certified piano prowess.

In December 2017 I had just spent my first term at university in Nottingham, living away from home for the first time – and much more importantly, away from a piano! Despite this dire living situation, I still managed to piece together what was to be the final physical DVD out of what I had learnt before heading off to uni, practised on a plasticky half-length keyboard awkwardly perched on my desk and plugged into GarageBand (until the next February when I got a full sized piano keyboard all of my own!). The DVD's cover was a digital collage of dozens of images of me, friends, family, and a few slightly random pop culture references, and was inspired by that of Sufjan Steven's All Delighted People EP.

Following many comments from certain family members about how no one actually appreciates twenty badly sight-read pieces (compounded by a combination of my own perfectionism and innate last-minute-ism), I decided to follow an ethos of quality over quantity. What this meant in practice was that my shortlist of twenty candidate songs was quickly whittled down to one that fulfilled the criteria of a) being previously unheard (performed by me, at least) and b) reaching my newly elevated quality standard. Suffice to say, no physical DVD was produced.