Old age

It's the only explanation I can come up with. A few weeks ago, we brought home some stuff from my parents' old house, including a rather magnificent slide rule. It must be about 4 feet long; it lay on my desk until (I think) yesterday, when I tried to find a home for it.

This evening, I was helping our daughter with her homework, when I suddenly realised that the perfect tool for doing the sums we were trying to do was - a slide rule. Not that I would expect, in the 21st century, that she should start using a slide rule to do multiplication and division, but that it would be fun to demonstrate another way to crack this particular nut. Sadly, I haven't the faintest idea where I put the treasured object. To quote a family friend, "It moost be soomwhair!" but where, Ah dinna ken! Fortunately, it wasn't the only slide rule in the house. My own slide rule, which I haven't used for 20 or more years, lives in the middle drawer of my desk, but after fishing it out, I thought that it might be nicer for us to use another of Grandad's slide rules, in fact the one I remember him using.

I always feel that there's something magic about a slide rule - the answer seems to appear out of nowhere - it's more magic than a calculator, because there's nothing hidden. Clearly, there's a wee man hiding inside the calculator, doing the sums, but everything about a slide rule is in the open. So this evening's experience was a good one, and I've encouraged our daughter to tell her teacher how she got the answers, maybe even to take Grandad's old slide rule into school (this one is a more manageable length).

But where, oh where is the other slide rule? I've even prayed, desperately - maybe you'll think that it's a silly thing to pray about, when there's so much trouble in the world - but my little faith can just about believe that God will help me to find something - after all, "It moost be soomwhair!"