Ian McMillan: Why my methods of maths just don’t add up

Everybody knew that this was a euphemism, even if we didn’t know the word. He’d come back a few minutes later reeking of Capstan Full Strength and mints and pick on some unfortunate individual to give him the answer to the conundrum on the board.

Once, even though I kept my head down, that unfortunate individual was me. “McMillan, lad!’ he barked like a character actor on an Alcatraz film. “Give us the benefit of your wisdom!”

To be honest, my mind doesn’t often go blank. Because I’ve always been a show-off who is good with words, I can normally come up with something, even if it’s rubbish. However, I can vividly recall that this time I put the bucket into the well and it came up dry. I checked the keep-net and there were no fish flapping there. The cupboard was bare. The room had been stripped. I sat there with my mouth hanging open and nothing came out.

My mate was sitting behind me. He didn’t like to see me like this, so he leaned forward and said: “Seventeen.”

“Seventeen!” I said, confidently. There was a silence you could have sliced into. “Put your head back in the sack, McMillan!” the teacher said, and my mate led the laughter. And that was the moment I fell out of love with numbers.

Actually, there was one maths lesson I recall with affection and that happened the term after when we had a student teacher. I remember he had a broken leg and hopped round the room on crutches trying to enthuse us about what was obviously his passion.

He attempted to get us going on the subject of infinity. We had to think of numbers and double them: 2 then 4 then 8 then 16 then 32 then 64 then 128 then 256 and so on until dinner time and we went to the canteen with vast numbers ringing in our ears like distant bells. That was the student’s last lesson and the next day the regular teacher was back and we were back in the land of X and Y and mints and cig smoke and my brain drifted away once more.

I got thinking about those enormous numbers the other day when loads of them started to impinge on my consciousness. I read about a footballer getting paid a hundred thousand pounds a week. I imagined a bulging brown envelope being passed to him on a Friday through a hatch like in some kind of factory in the old days. The envelope would be the size of a pillow-case and the footballer would have to sign for it. I worked out (see, my maths lessons taught me something) that he would be getting over five million pounds a year. I got my man-purse out because I knew it was full of change.

I tipped out a load of gleaming pound coins; eight in all. They made a nice pile on the table, quite high, quite valuable. I tried to imagine a thousand of them, then a hundred thousand, then five million pound coins stretching to Pluto and beyond. I then thought about statistics: we’re told that there are nearly three million unemployed people in this country. I pictured the biggest crowd I’d ever seen, about 80,000 people at Wembley in 2000 when Barnsley played Ipswich in the Championship play-off final, and three million is more than thirty times that amount. I tried to picture three million people, lining up at a dole office like in that old Conservative Party poster, and I couldn’t.

My mind came up against a brick wall, like it used to in the maths lessons and I found that, hard as I tried, I couldn’t make my numerical imagination go any further. Then somebody on the radio started spouting about the national defecit and talked blithely of billions and trillions and my head gave up. I changed the channel and listened to some music.

It’s just the hugeness that baffles us, and maybe we need to reverse the trend to re-engage us with these big topics. Let’s think about what getting paid a hundred thousand pounds really means, what it looks like, how heavy it is, how many pints of milk you could buy with it. Instead of discussing the millions of unemployed, let’s home in on a family, or an individual or a couple that you know who are struggling to pay the bills. Let’s ban talk of billions. It’s not helping.

Or maybe I should just put my head back in the sack. Seventeen: that’s the answer!