A Zippo lighter

Another of the array of then-exotic items that my father brought back from the US in 1972.

He gave it to me in 1986, when he gave up smoking his pipe (as a child, I was fascinated by his thumb’s leather callous from tamping-down burning tobacco). My friends and I used it to light illicit cigarettes in an underground room at school; I told him I used it to light the hob in the brew-room. Did I really believe he believed that?

When I still smoked, this was never out of my sight; it was too precious to me, even though my father was still alive. Everyone who knew me knew this was my father’s Zippo. Such an ordinary, utilitarian, perfect object; nothing superfluous, and still working perfectly in its fifth decade, lighting camp-fires and grills for billy-cans.

I’ve taken years off my life with it, maybe just as he did; and one day my son will walk down the street, irresistibly thumb-clanking it open and shut in his pocket, just as we both did.