Pound sign Nightmares.

OK I’ve got a degree in maths but as soon as there’s a pound sign in front of a number I become a worrier. Maybe in my long forgotten youth I was castigated for forgetting my dinner-money. Millimetres, kilograms, torque and acceleration in imperial or metric and I’m fine, but currency…. my brain freezes over. Brrrr. In the last few days of having to make some important financial decisions I’ve tried to look at how it affects me. I sense that my conscious brain can’t get hold of the nebulous value of money; nebulous not only because it’s actual value is negotiable but because everyone has their own ethic of valuation. Though my conscious does its best to make sense of all these imponderables its efforts lead to a continuum of failure. I have an unanswerable anxiety, a sword of Damocles twitching above my left eyeball. This only reinforces my conscious focus on its aforesaid failure. I find myself yearning to measure a piece of wood with a ruler. I find myself cut off from my energetic encounter with life by a foggy wall of unease. OK I accept I’m a hopeless case, each to his own and all that, and some bankers might have trouble weighing out half a pound of mince, but even with some finance guys I’ve met, who’re totally comfortable with pound signs, I sense that same lack of energetic encounter with the life. They’re enthusiastic, ebullient, intelligent and skilled but lacking in some quality I find in plumbers and midwives. When one’s hand and eye grapple daily with the quirks of reality, the grain of wood, the gurgling air of a central heating system, the blood of birth, one is in touch with the basic rationality of the physical world. It is ponderable, and a centimetre will always be a centimetre. Today I heard someone comment, “Leave the Fed in charge of the Sahara and in six months there’d be a shortage of sand.” Someone give me a piece of wood to measure.