even the well-heeled but thrifty residents of Kensington, Chelsea and Hampstead were known to shop discreetly for their country weekends garb of Barbours, Hunter wellies, tweedy hats with feathers and 'little clorth caps' (as described by Viscount Stansgate, or as he doggedly insists, the more proletarian Tony Benn) ...
but we will forgive him, for we are magnanimous folk, as he served as a pilot in the RAF, which sent Plod wondering what his crew room nickname was - had it been "Vis" or maybe "count" or maybe....
and sometimes "Wedgwood Benny", after his upmarket china mug that his mater gave him, and the gormless looking knitted beanie hat he always wore because Benny from "Crossroads" was his idol, (this being long back in the mists of time, before the young tyro adopted the "little clorth cap" and Crossroads was at last put out of its misery and blessedly killed off) ...
although Plod would really have preferred a Faber-Castell log/log slide rule with the "special wood" body, and loads of useful formulae and functions on the back, but as his old mother always said, "never look a gift slide rule in the cursor" (his mum was a bit odd, she even believed there really was such a thing as the square root of minus one!), so he had made the best of it, only getting the calendar conversion a couple of days out ...
until that time when he was trying to compute his overtime payment for that month, saw a Zephyr, blues and twos, rounding the corner on two wheels; in his excitement the cursor flew off the end, down a grating; in an instant Plod had become cursor-less - boy did he curse..,.
where it slid down the thirteenth back into 3D space, exactly 0.127m above Plod's head at negligible velocity. Influenced by gravity it fell, bounced off his noggin and landed on the sidewalk in front of him. "Ah, there it is!" Plod exclaimed happy that his precious sliderule was whole once again. After sliding the cursor back in its rightful place he wandered off to...
