I am Trevor Ryder, and I am a musician with Dupuytren’s Contracture My talk will cover how I have learned to cope and adapt musically to Dupuytren’s Disease, and how I am using my music to raise support for the charitable work of the British Dupuytren’s Society. I will ask for no fee – only travelling expenses - although I hope some may donate to the BDS after hearing me speak. Dupuytren’s contracture is a little-known and understood disease and yet over 20% of the UK population have it. It is a benign thickening of the connective tissue, or fascia, of the palm and fingers. If the condition progresses fully (which is not always the case) the affected fingers are pulled towards the palm and cannot be straightened anymore. I started developing the first signs of Dupuytren's in my late forties. Although I was a Geography teacher by profession, I was also an amateur classical guitarist, good enough to give occasional recitals and guitar lessons at the school where I taught. My plan was always to continue to play and teach classical guitar after retiring from mainstream teaching. Dupuytren's put an end to that ambition. By my mid-fifties, I'd had two operations under general anaesthetic on my left hand and one on my right. Two more operations on my left hand were done in 2019 and 2020. These operations have left both hands with limited dexterity and manual strength and, due to nerve damage, I have incomplete feeling in the fingers and palm of the left hand. All this means I have had to give up playing the classical guitar As a result, I have begun to re-learn instruments that have fewer strings and where you play melodies, rather than chords. I've also returned to the folk music I first played when I was a student at school and university, with traditional folk bands and as a solo singer. For a long time I used to "dabble" on instruments I'm now taking more seriously; tenor banjo, mandolin, harmonica, tin whistle and bodhrán (Irish drum). I've also started to learn more unusual folk instruments - Appalachian dulcimer, autoharp and banjo ukulele as well as octave mandolin, mandocello and Irish bouzouki which I now use instead of an acoustic guitar in some song accompaniments. It's now more than ten years since my first-hand surgery, but the effects of Dupuytren's are still there (I get bad cramps in the fingers after playing for any length of time), and signs of it recurring in both hands are becoming more obvious.