Book I can't let go: Collins Essential Calculator

Condition: good

Inscribed, in ink:
To Ken, so you can make billions and billions in the Mediterranean sun.
Yolande
4/7/81
Weybridge

Probably bought by my father at a jumble sale or church fête within a four-mile radius of Weybridge. So much for the sun. I expect Ken had a calculator.

Published 1975, first and presumably last edition.

Content: computer-set tables for multiplication, division and percentages, including profit percentage on sales or mark-up.  Goes up to 99 x 1050 and 60% margin. 

Some worked examples are provided. 'It takes 77lbs of sand to cover 1 sq. yard. How much sand is required to cover 640 sq. yards?' Answer in tons, please.

Brexiter cult value: high. Salutes imperial measurements and outdated drudgery; ignores need to be competitive in today's market.

Reason for keeping: misplaced nostalgia for a totem of certainty.

A for Arthur

My father has always made lists. Here is an extract from an unexplained handwritten list, in alphabetical order. Probably from the 1980s, it's fastened with a rusty staple:

abominable snowman
abortion
acid rain
act of God
Aladdin and his lamp
alchemy
alienation
all that glisters is not gold
amniotic sac
ampersand
Ancien Régime
Armstrong, Louis
Augean stables

Now he lists the flavour of each liquid nutrition supplement that he drinks, three times a day, in a notebook. This afternoon he writes down: 'fruits of the forest'.

A nurse puts her hand on his shoulder. 'I love you, Arthur.'

Daddy

'Yes, sir, that's my baby, 
No, sir, don't mean maybe,
Yes, sir, that's my baby now.'


'Go to sleep, my baby, 
Close your pretty eyes...' 
(he always gets the next bit wrong)


'There is a lady sweet and kind
Was never face so pleased my mind
I did but see her passing by
And yet I love her 'til I die.'

'So far I've kept my sanity. I said I’d never and I never have played bowls. Are you still left-handed, lovey? Good girl.’ 

I tell him to finish his lunch. ‘Get double stuffed,’ he says. But that's how we talk.

A portrait of a parent is essentially a self-portrait. I draw five over a couple of hours and he says that being drawn is like being on holiday. I am too shy to ask him to hold his portraits for a photo like all my other sitters.

I last drew him when I was 13, for art homework. He is reading The Times, which was in broadsheet format then.

My drawing at the age of 13