My Life in Mathematics

I wasn't very good at mathematics at the start of my life.

When I was seven years old I had to sit a single short exam which trotted through all of my school subjects. I was a superb student and most of the questions were a breeze, but I remember the Maths question completely stumped me: "How is the number One Hundred written in digits?".

I spent more time thinking about that question than on the rest of the test put together, and when the headmaster finally announced the end of the exam I hurriedly wrote down my best and most logical guess. Never before having heard of the number 'One Hundred', I came up with the reasonable logic that if 'hundred' was written '100', then 'one hundred' was logically the same thing only with an extra 1 at the start. I wrote down my answer: 1100.

With literally a single stroke, I completely failed my maths exam.

When I was eight years old we were supposed to learn our times tables, however Mrs Fox - a golden-haired woman who all the boys idolised - was off on maternity leave and the temporary teachers had no idea what we were supposed to be learning. I remember there was a stack of flash cards you could use with a partner if you wanted to teach it to yourself, but lessons were generally very unstructured that year, so much so that I was able to focus on woodwork for most of the time. I thus spent a lot of that year making myself model boats, which was not as impressive as it sounds as it largely comprised nailing two or three pieces of scrap wood together.

I ended primary school with a collection of pretty awful wooden boats and absolutely no knowledge of the times tables. When the headmaster realised the problem was endemic, he instructed my entire year to learn the multiplication tables during the summer holidays before joining middle school, but somehow I forgot all about it and frolicking in the sun and eating ice cream took over.

Joining middle school, aged nine, it turned out that most of the other decent students had learned their tables during the holidays, and as it was immediately spotted that I didn't know how to multiply at all it was naturally assumed I was a dunce. I was immediately streamed into the remedial maths class, which was a bit of a shock for someone who was otherwise streamed in the top class for all of the other subjects. For one thing, remedial mathematics was taught by the art teacher, Mrs Rees, and there was therefore no chance I would ever learn anything.

The one vital lesson I did learn was: always check the back of the book to see if the answers are printed there. With this single skill, I went in one year from mathematical retard to mathematical genius, scoring maximum points in every test. At the end of the year I was promoted to the top set, and I imagine Mrs Rees earned herself great respect in the staff room. As I left the class, I whispered my secret to Stuart Colefaks in the clandestine hope he too might wield my hidden talent to reveal his hidden potential, but alas he was such an extraordinary idiot I doubt he was even able to find the back of the book.

And so I turned ten, and was in the top class for maths where they didn't print the answers in the same book as the questions. This wasn't just tragic because I still hadn't learned my times tables, but also because everyone else in top set had been taught long division, while I was effectively being taught how to drool over a protractor. I had literally no idea what I was doing. I was able to scrape by without knowing how to multiply - mathematics finally started getting theoretical, and so we spent a lot of time drawing triangles and then cutting them up to prove the angles added up to a straight line - but I recall one particularly painful test of our long division.

It was an oral exam, and the teacher would read out a division puzzle and we'd have a minute or two to work out the answer. "135 divided by 5", the teacher would announce. David Harrelson - who sat beside me - would immediately put the first number in a little box, the second number to its left and then suddenly and mysteriously the answer would start writing itself across the top of the box. I was fasincated by this black magic, but wholly unable to emulate it.

Instead, I would turn to the back of my exercise book and mark five dots - well-spaced out - and then add another round of dots, counting to ten, and then more and more until I'd counted up to 135. I'd then have 5 groups containing 135 dots in total, and could work out the answer to the question simply by counting the number of dots in one group (in this case, 27). Simple, if time consuming.

I got through most of the test this way, but towards the end the numbers started getting so high I was taking too long to draw out all of the dots and was missing questions out. I recall David Harrelson saw what I was doing and started mocking me, but fortunately he was not remotely cool and so no-one else joined in.

By age eleven I was moved to Mr Nicholson's class, still in the top set by some fluke of chance. My lack of knowledge of multiplication tables was no problem here as there was a chart of them up on the wall, and 50% of the time Mr Nicholson forgot to take them down during tests. The chart was also helpful as I found mathematics so boring I sought entertainment elsewhere, and found it in memorising the numbers on the wall and - as I have both a strong numerical brain and a superb visual memory, or at least I did before I started drinking - finally I started to understand the structure of numbers, and to realise that division is really just the times tables in reverse. This was a realisation I should have had three years earlier.

Twelve was a breeze with this new information, and I think by then my dad had also explained long division (however, looking back, long division makes no real sense anymore). At thirteen I transferred to big school, where calculators were allowed, and suddenly numbers were not remotely important anymore. You literally didn't even need to be able to count, so I started doing extremely well.

I remember scoring 98% on a GCSE mock paper in 1991, and getting the highest score in my class (58%) on an 'A' Level mock paper in 1993 (despite being the only one in the room not to have realised there were two sides to the exam paper). Of course, by this stage the real geniuses were in the Advanced Math class, preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams. I decided I was lucky enough to be doing this well without pushing it any further, which somewhat upset the teacher who'd hoped I would go on to be a rising star on the math stage. Seeing how much trouble Olivia had with Cambridge-level mathematics (you really had to be either autistic or truly devoted) I am quite glad I allowed my life in mathematics to end there.

And now I work for an accountancy firm. Go figure.