Don't Know Much About History

I've been quite determined to pick up the quill and see where it wanders this week. I started thinking that musing about London was going to work. Of course it does. As always it leads me on a Ronnie Corbett ramble. Ever thus. Ever thus.

When I look back, I realise that my relationship with London has been ongoing for as long as I can remember. Back in the sixties my grandfather would load us up into the car and head north (out of Eynsford) for a treat. Some of them I remember well. We saw deer in Richmond Park. The Cutty Sark. The museums of Greenwich. Once we crossed the river on the Woolwich ferry and must have wandered into the area where I now live fifty years later. I wish I could remember that better.

My grandfather was high up, both in seniority and physically (it was a tall building) in The National Westminster Bank. Occasionally we would go with my grandmother to his office in the city.

Not much remains in my mind of this but I can recall that a back room they had a wonderful machine. Through carefully wired bulbs of a long ago vintage, this behemoth forerunner of the desktop calculator could add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers of great length in the blink of an eye. It could also work things out in the whispered future of decimal currency as well as the good old Lira, Sisterce, and Denarius.
I suspect now that the only likely candidate was an Anita Calculator illustrated above. Probably a Mark 10 which would be right for around 1965. My reaction to it was love at first sight. I recognise now the start of an intoxication with computing and the electromechanical that has served me well.

I don't think many kids in the sixties were allowed such generously familiar acquaintance.
For the next ten years or so I mastered tables, logarithms, the slide rule.
In the mid seventies I hit lucky again and had the brilliant fortune to get the first cheap programmable calculator from Sinclair.

Sam Cooke popularised the lyric, but he wasn't speaking to me.