10th February

We are now mid February and soon we will mark two years since my lovely Dad passed away.  He has been on my mind a lot recently - not least because the dreadful weather and my awful cold has meant I have not been up to the cemetery for a few days to have my regular chat with him.  I will remedy this as soon as I can.

I can remember as a child my Dad used to have a smart black combination locked briefcase which held all sorts of treasures which absolutely fascinated me - not least his trusty slide rule.  Youngsters from a computerised age will have absolutely no idea what a fabulous piece of kit a slide rule was - a non electronic item which knocked initial calculators into a cocked hat.  It was an education in itself to work out the calculations you could make - OMG I loved that slide rule which had, over time, taken on that yellow hue of age - I loved it so much that I actually got one of my own - I was a nerdy child with a love of mathematics - taking that particular 'O' level at just 15 and getting an A grade (when A was the highest you could achieve).

Alongside the magical slide rule was an item which Dad had found as a boy and kept but whose use remained a mystery to us for years until, with the help of the internet, I managed to identify that the precision made metal item with 8 markers was, as we had suspected, a hand-held device for counting the balls in a cricket over and was a rare item because apparently in 1939 England started a two-year experiment in domestic cricket to trial an eight ball over but it lasted only a year since war broke out in autumn and when cricket returned to England they reverted to the six-ball rule.  I offered the item to the MCC Cricket Museum because we felt it should be somewhere where other people could appreciate it - they were so keen to have it in their collection that they actually bought it.  If anyone goes to the museum it would be really great to know that it is there on display.

Alongside an old 1811 Cornish Penny and three seemingly unused 10 Shilling Notes I have had in my possession for years a brass item which has intrigued John and I.  Dad had no idea what it was or even where it had come from except he suspected it had been his Dad's or Granddad's and it had sat in Dad's tool box for years.  It was brass and looked like it had been an ammunition round in a previous life but when you unscrewed the top inside was a little spoon.  We wondered if it was trench art and was for snuff but had no idea.  Then yesterday an item in the Daily Mail where a couple had found something similar (theirs was a suspected WWII German Cyanide Bottle) I embarked on some serious investigation which led to our discovering exactly what this mysterious item was.  This is an SMLE oil bottle - A little bottle filled with oil which was clipped into the butt of a Lee Enfield Rifle.  We think, because my Granddad was in a reserved occupation as a bus driver, that as a member of the Home Guard he would have been issued with a Lee Enfield Rifle and so this would have been his.  We think it is a Mark IV as the base is flat.

I was so chuffed to have finally solved the mystery of the brass bottle - this would not have happened had I not been laid up in bed reading the paper so there was an upside to me having lurgy.