In these post-Rodney Bewes days, we often hear about a ‘trillion’. A trillion dollar debt for example, or a trillion strawberries inside a giant concrete mixer. But how big IS a trillion exactly? Our little thought experiment can help to explain.

Imagine a sparrow pecking the top of a shiny pedal bin, because the stupid fucking thing has seen its own reflection and thinks its another bird.

Next, please imagine that the sparrow does this 8 times a second for the next 204 years, and the bin is travelling at 40 mph. That’s just over one mile.

Now visualise, if you will, an entire army (or air force) of sparrows doing the same thing. Say there’s 12 sparrows to a platoon (or squadron) and 56 of these units in the strike force. Adding all this up comes to 30 mph, or 9 miles.

Now contemplate a fat man trying to push his foot through your letter box but falling over and being taken off to hospital in a wheelie bin. Let’s say that Fatty weighs 254 lbs and he lives in Hereford. So, that’s another 23 miles.

Finally, imagine the Sun ate Whiskas cat food all day for the next month (31 days). It’s over 90 miles from Hereford to the Sun, so that’s another 8 miles.

Add all of these numbers together and you get 1 mile.

Well, a ‘trillion’ is just over a trillion times that.

That’s all for this time, but we’ll be back with more amazing Minty explainers soon! Hangman.

The Best Nuisance I Can Be isn’t full of outright nonsense like the above, but does contain a fair amount of daftness. It’s a novelisation of my real 1984-85 college diaries, covering my final undergraduate year. That tumultuous time was jam-packed full of friendship, love, fun… as well as horrible self-discovery.

If you ‘get’ the page you’ve just read, then you’ll instinctively understand why hiding my neighbour’s glasses inside a frozen chicken, introducing myself as ‘NKAARK!!’, and sending drawings of a shark eating Christmas cake to Lloyd’s Bank were – and remain – necessary activities.