Monday 1 May 2017

Something I'd forgotten

One of my parents daily rituals was to change the date on a device on top of the bureau which displayed the day, date and month.  My equivalent is to change the date on my Rubik's cube-style calendar , which also gives the day, ate and month: the month in three-letter form ("Jan", "Feb", "Mar" etc).  It's nice that the names of the months in English make this possible (though www.puzl.co.uk, where I got my calendar cube, have also sold French and German versions).

But I was astonished to find in the cellar yesterday that I had made something similar myself, 35 years ago.  I have absolutely no recollection of this at all (but the handwriting is mine), but I am quite impressed by my ingenuity.


In my final year as a student, I played backgammon regularly with my friend Karen.  It appears that I constructed this device to keep track of the cumulative score.  It's rather the worse for wear, and has lost one of the corner cubies.  But I assume that it still records the final state of play when we had played our last game - which shows that, if you want to win at a gambling game, it is best not to play against a future professor of psychology.

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