My father's reign of mathematical precision

16 July 2014

My father didn’t like to be taken by surprise.

As a civil engineer, his professional life was a matter of mathematics and rules. Driving over a bridge, he’d quote the equations that ensured it was safe and stable.

'To be at equilibrium, the horizontal forces and the vertical forces must be equal to what?'

This went straight over my head, which was usually buried in a book, probably a novel about an eccentric family in the Greek islands. 'Whatever you say, Dad.'

There were formulae in his domestic life too. Strict rules about stacking the dishwasher. Knives and forks pointed downwards, to avoid careless stabbings.

As for family holidays: the Apollo space missions that put a man on the moon were not planned with more attention to detail. Dossiers were prepared, detailed itineraries drawn up, budgets, timetables, maps marked with multi-coloured dots. Once the trip started, every event was documented in slides to be sorted, boxed and filed away for the years to come.

Dad kept his monthly accounts in notebooks detailing expenditure, bank balances, and cash in hand. He wrote out the figures with a fountain pen, double-checking everything on his old calculator. He never owned a credit card, because they deceive you into spending money you don’t have. He regarded the stock market as a casino and never invested in shares.

After dad died, I went through his desk and found a much-used leather blotter, frayed at the edges; lots of spare batteries; two sets of small precision screwdrivers; a Swiss Army knife; seven rulers; two metal tape measures and two ribbon tape measures; ten rolls of sticky tape; six packets of adhesive labels; squared notebooks containing plans of the house and garden drawn from various elevations; numbered lists of household tasks; a small compass on a chain.

There was also a box full of keys, all carefully labeled. ‘Greenhouse.’ ‘Large case.’ ‘Small case’. ‘Shed.’ ‘Shed—spare.’ Because God forbid that you’re caught without a spare shed key.

Dad died on a winter day in 2012. He was shopping with my mother when his heart gave out and he collapsed pushing a trolley outside the supermarket. They called an ambulance but nothing could be done.

The obvious moral, like a Dutch painting depicting the figure of Death at someone’s door, would be: ‘All your planning can never prevent the final, unexpected event.’

But Dad knew that life was unpredictable, and had his wild moments when young. He led a jazz

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My father's reign of mathematical precision

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