Bill Clark

Listening to the row about the meagre pay rise being floated for NHS staff, and thinking about the fiscal balancing act that the Chancellor is undertaking to pay back more money than there are numbers in the world, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem lies in successive governments determination to dumb down the maths that run our systems to the point where any creature with a decimal number of digits to work with can understand it. I was born into a society without a metric nerve in its body. We were avoirdupois, l.s.d. and imperial to our roots. We had stones, shillings and chains to consider using intricate mathematical relationships that seemed to have no logical relationship   and operated independently of each other. It was complex and challenging - but it taught us how to think outside the binary world and consider different ways that arithmetical systems could solve problems. When I started work in my father’s print works in the early 70s, I was tasked with learning every

Today is the official ground-dig start of the HS2 build. At a time when the country, ravaged by a disease which it, apparently, didn't see coming is financially broken by the cost of deferring redundancies and bankruptcies and has discovered new, travel free ways of doing business, the government is undertaking yet another Bob the builder project which will inevitably spiral out of cost control, take far longer than has been planned and ultimately, be of little benefit to the commuting population that will pay for it. There really is little defence of this project on any level. The idea that the save in time will be of benefit to the business community in 2050 is ludicrous. By then technology will provide us with instant visual communication anywhere in the world and electric helicopters to take us anywhere we need to be in the security of our own space.