GREAT GRANDAD

It was a funny and surprising thing that brought Grandad back to me. It was algebra. I couldn‘t cope with algebra in my first year at secondary school, and it made me mad. ―I don‘t see the point of it,‖ I screamed. ―I don‘t know what it‘s for!

Grandad, as it turned out, liked algebra and he sat opposite me and didn‘t say anything for a while, considering my problem in that careful expressionless way of his. Eventually he said, ―Why do you do PE1 at school?‖

―What?‖

―PE. Why do they make you do it?‖

―Because they hate us?‖ I suggested.

―And the other reason?‖

―To keep us fit, I suppose.‖

―Physically fit, yes.‖

He reached across the table and put the first two fingers of each hand on the sides of my head.

―There is also mental fitness, isn‘t there? I can explain to you why algebra is useful. But that is not what algebra is really for.‖

He moved his fingers gently on my head.

―It‘s to keep what is in here healthy. PE is for the head. And the great thing is you can do it sitting down. Now, let us use these little puzzles here to take our brains for a jog.‖

2 13 And it worked. Not that I fell in love with algebra. But I did come to see that it was possible to enjoy it. Grandad taught me that maths signs and symbols were not just marks on paper. They were not flat. They were threedimensional, and you could approach them from different directions. You could take them apart and put them together in a variety of shapes, like Lego. I stopped being afraid of them.

I didn‘t know it at the time, of course, but those homework sessions helped me to discover my Grandad. Algebra turned out to be the key that opened the invisible door he lived behind and let me in.

Now I learnt that Grandad‘s world was full of miracles and mazes3 , mirrors and misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and labyrinths4 , by the origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes – although he never laughed at them – by anything that might mean something else. I discovered My Grandad.

1 PE [ˌpiːˈiː] физкультура / фізкультура

2 to take our brains for a jog [dʒɒɡ] шевелить мозгами / галавою варушыць

3 a maze [meɪz] путаница / блытаніна

4 a labyrinth [ˈlæbərɪnθ] лабиринт / лабірынт