Homage to my father (1909 - 1974)

He would have been delighted with today.
Would have been standing here with his watch, waiting for 10 mins 10 secs past 10 this morning. He loved stuff like this, and time questions (often unanswerable), palindromes of time like 28-1-82 etc, palindrome words or phrases, strange maths, inventing things, and thinking up excuses for having a party. Today would have been a good enough reason.

There was an auspicious start for his inventiveness, being born the day Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel on 25 July 1909. (The single historical fact I will never get wrong.) He did puzzles, and made them up to send to the local paper. He invented the electric blanket. Well there was such a thing, but primitive. So primitive it was a) unheard of and b) soon burst into flames without exception and without provocation. When this happened on my mother's side of the bed, he sat down with a whisky, pencil and graph paper, a common sight in our house after dinner.

Then he invented the curtain tape set-up which didn't need a pelmet. Thousands were instantly released from Victorian drapery habits and heavy velvet pasted to cardboard.  And invented heating tapes to go under football pitches and prevent ice on hump-backed bridges - all webbing and tape things his company could make.
The one thing he wished he'd invented was the cat's eyes in the road.

He went to church sometimes, just the local C of E, but religious botherers would walk up our path at their peril.
He would open the door, but before they could get into their stride he'd interrupt:

"Do you understand infinity?"

Deathly silence, botherers hopping from foot to foot awkwardly.

"No? Well when you do, you can come back and preach at me."


Well done that man. As far as he was concerned, only God understood infinity. End of. He spent AGES trying to grasp it, and always shrugged that we just didn't have the necessary brain evolution to handle it.  Correct. Didn't stop him trying.

He loved Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson - seemed an anomaly to me in my ignorant teens because he listened to classical music, first to last. (Didn't understand complexities, age 15.)

He'd have loved computing. Am sure he would have got into programming, no bother at all.
And maths puzzles - he did this one and sent it to the paper - Manchester Guardian, I think, as was. I sent it to a maths-lady-acquaintance recently. Blowed if I knew where to start with it.

AND SHE DID IT. SHE ACTUALLY DID IT.   I was VERY impressed. My father would have wanted to talk to her for hours.

You know who you are, very clever person !!!

The text is written thus:
"Mr William Wood sends the following puzzle:- The problem is to translate into figures the following long division sum, expressed in a series of x's, apart from one figure. The solution can be arrived at by deductive reasoning and no guesswork is necessary. There is only one solution and the answer is not as hard as it looks." 

Hah!

 

And when there was a party into the early hours (every one of them now I think about it), he would get all enthusiastic and the violin would appear. He would serenade everybody in turn, but was too happy to notice the slightly suspect bow action.  Inexplicably, people would start to drift away. He cleared the house in twenty minutes. Sometimes on purpose, I suspect.

But he wasn’t done yet. Safety conscious to the core, he would step into the road while they backed out of the drive, stopping and directing the traffic with violin and bow.   

Happy 10–10–10, father !