One of the joys of old age is that sometimes- for no particular reason- a little thought,or incident, from the past drops into your mind from nowhere.
This happened yesterday while I was doing a sudoku and drawing the figure five, carefully, in a little box.
I was the youngest of a family of seven children so consequently between the age of about 2 and 6 I was alone with my mother while the others were at school. I was spoiled, as they say, rotten- but I now realise that my mother enjoyed these times quite as much as I did- which was of course why I wasn’t sent to school until I turned six.
These mornings with my mother were great times for tete a tetes. My father was at this time managing director of Dwyer and Company an enormous wholesale warehouse/ manufacturing company in Cork and I knew, from visits to “the warehouse” with my mother that he was held in great reverence, at that stage anyway, there.
One day I asked my mother, in genuine curiosity, why was our father manager of all those people. My mother, caught short and not keen to point out that it was a (more or less) inherited position grasped at straws and said it was because he was “very good at figures”- this I was happy to accept as one of my major efforts at that stage in life was to make beautiful letters and numbers. Obviously, I realised, that if I made really beautiful numbers- like my father did- I would go far.
For many years, even after I started school, I tried to emulate my fathers script and strangely now, sixty something years later I can see the ghost of his handwriting in my own, and remember, all these years later, how I tried to copy the way he made the figure five.