Why do we have an obsession with making everything straightforward?

Has it ever occurred to you that the continued existence of various bits of our body is as delicate as that of the rural post office. You’ve probably seen the slogan: “Use it or lose it”. In post offices that is, not on your body.

When humans decided to stop swinging through trees and no longer needed the counter-balancing effect of a tail, snip! there it was gone leaving us only with a coccyx - the continued existence of which is obviously down to needing a painful reminder of how not to sit down.

And I may be wrong, and frequently am, but it’s probably safe to assume that we lost webbed feet and hands when, some time before we climbed into the trees, we crawled out of the swamps for a higher dryer lifestyle.

My mother alluded to much the same theory when, many years ago, she sarcastically scolded her eldest son with: “What? Lost the use of your legs have you?” as I became one with the sofa in front of the telly during my adolescent years.

This Darwinian development is a serious issue, one of which we need to be conscious and, as you’ll soon see, one which would be impossible to ponder if my greater fears are realised.

It seems that we’re continually under pressure to make life as simple as possible. The simple solution, we’re often being told, is the best. As you may well remember, for years those enlightened, well paid and securely employed bureaucrats in Brussels insisted that we drop our beloved pounds and ounces, following the demise, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, of pounds shillings and pence here in the UK. “Counting in tens is good” they tell us. It’s simple because we have ten fingers and toes.

Is that it? Why not ones as in heads, or twos as in arms, or threes as in the wheels of a Reliant Robin? Yes sure, millimetres divide into centimetres divide into metres and into kilometres and so on. But any system can be made to work and I actually know, yet can’t explain due to not enough space and a distinctly poor memory, that mathematically, counting in eights is a lot more logical than in tens. And anyway, I like pounds and ounces in the same way I liked our old money. They’re different and make us think.

It doesn’t need to be a problem. Nowadays, with microchips and phone apps, foreigners can work out conversions and anyway, everyone coped perfectly well with the money in the old days. But the really big bonus would be that, if we wanted, we could use the subject to stretch and exercise our brains. It’s a little like the way we use crosswords or Sudoku. We need our brains to work but if we only did word searches our brains would soon shrivel up and drop off. If we didn’t use it we’d lose it.

Simple’s not always best. Who wants dead straight roads? Whodunits resolved in the first page? Food microwaved straight from the packet?

It already is? Which proves my point because, despite our desire to be entertained by food on TV we’re already losing the ability to cook which means part of the brain’s already become redundant. Mark my words, if we don’t exercise the rest it’ll go the same way.

I know it seems odd that I’m arguing against going to restaurants or even occasionally buying our Oldfields Pantry ready meals. But I’m a business person and recognise an opportunity when I see it. And even I, with my passion for home cooking, recognise that we sometimes run out of time and also occasionally need a little pampering.

But thank heaven those meddling bureaucrats let us continue with our ancient system, long live pounds and ounces and let’s follow the French example and sell our food in pounds as they do in their rural markets. Un demi de livre de cerveaux s'il vous plaît. That’ll keep us clever.