Hinzu - In Addition

In addition, you add something (often a number) to something else (usually another number) to make something new (generally another, bigger number - unless you’re dealing with a negative number, in which case you may well be adding, but could somehow end up with a smaller one. It doesn‘t even have to be a one. Twos, threes, sevens and sixty-fours are all common too.) Giant bracketed nonsensical asides aside, maths is great. It gives us a mechanism for understanding a multitude of massively important things, like how to work out what time it is in different countries, counting how many red, blue or yellow cars are parked on your street, and even how to divide equally your cut from that cigar heist in Rotherham last week, Steven. I saw it, even if the police didn’t. You and your two little midget helpers. Kept on dropping the boxes? Short arms in a heist scenario? Good idea was it? Why don’t we say it’s twenty thousand split three ways? What? You don‘t count them as halves? Okay then, four ways. No, I can’t work that out either. Let’s just call it three grand.

The trouble is I’m just awful at maths, and can’t remember how to do the most rudimentary pre-GCSE stuff. The ability to perform long multiplication and division ran away over ten years ago. It’s too easy to not bother when a calculator can do it for you in a fraction of the time. What precise fraction I couldn’t say, because that ability is also long gone. I really should try to pick up an old text book and do some maths to exercise my brain at least a little, because I can feel that impeding idiocy starting to kick my door in like an angry estate-based ex demanding child support. Just a few simultaneous equations a day, a couple of mean, medians and modes, a handful of highest common factors! I’d be up to (or equalling) speed in no (distance over) time. On the downside, it would probably open the floodgates to a whole host of similarly awful maths-based jokes within these writings. But I’ve forgotten how to work out probabilities too, so chances are it won’t happen. Thankfully I’m completely out of ideas, so it’s time to end, utterly out of steam and on a definite negative. Death. Ha! Now it’s positive, so there.