Me learn maths? There's no percentage in it When the kitchen wireless is on of a morning, I mostly listen with equanimity to duels that nobody wins, but yesterday I froze at the sink with my stomach clenched. The word "binary" kept flying round the room like a trapped bat: Cameron wants Scots - or Scotland, or Scottish devolutionists - to make "a binary choice"; Cameron tells Tory MPs that Ken v Boris will be "the binary moment of 2012." There's a real binary moment going on, heh heh. Everyone likes a fresh buzzword for spring - brightening the place up like new cushions on the sofa. I was wishing they'd shut up, though. When I hear the word binary I get nee-naw, nee-naws in my ear. Calculus - same thing. Linear equations - same thing. The word number-crunching makes my teeth feel furry, as though I'm experiencing a weak, bastard form of synaesthesia. If it were just numbers glowing green and purple I wouldn't mind, but it's weird to feel you need to floss when someone mentions integers. I approved of distant minors for chemists. But I was startled when my choice (for Eng Lang and Lit major) was one of: Statistics and Marketing, Chemistry or Binary Maths. Why didn't I do statistics and marketing? Because I was too young to realise that marketing would (in my lifetime) become a career, with prospects, even high political prospects, such that you might end up running a major arm of government such as Capita or PwC or the Home Office. One of the Northern chemists, discussing my options, said binary maths has only two numbers. He: "Think of a light-switch. On/off, OK? Two numbers, one for on and one for off. Even you could cope with that. I signed up. Attended lectures and everything until a notice went up saying the distant minor no longer counted towards the degree. After the binary politics finished, a woman called Paula came on with more sums. She explained how bad she had been at maths at school, how innumerate she was, and - once she had children coming in with maths homework - how she had determined to get better. My husband (good at maths; does mine) was listening with interest. Paula sounded as though she was in her thirties and had been educated at one of the Blair/Blunkett bog-standard comprehensives. You went to grammar school, though. Why are you so bad at maths? Because I was in Army schools until I was 12. And arrived off a troopship in mid-year, or mid-term even. And there's a vital stage between Sums Are Fun! and Now Here's Your Algebra Homework. I missed it. He asked why didn't I do a maths course like Paula? I reeled in my chair. If I was going to start trying to push anything extra into my head at this late stage of life, why on earth wouldn't it be Italian? Or the art of French cooking? Surely you'd enjoy knowing how to do percentages, wouldn't you? He can do my percentages. I did not remember, until I spoke to a friend yesterday, that I had it wrong even about the two binary numbers. I thought they were 1 and 2. "One and ZERO, woman!" she said. She likes maths, because she likes knowing there's a right and a wrong. So does my husband. Both are cradle Catholics, strangely.