OOOH yes please. I'd love to have given up maths. Why is a quadratic equation? What is trigonometry for? How do you avoid a hungry hypotenuse?

Amazingly, I passed O level maths. Just. Could even still prove Pythagoras, if really pushed. But why? My life has been complete without it.

What I can't do is sums, which is a serious handicap, especially when working out my overdraft or my expenses. And as for APRs...

So Darlington teacher Terry Bladen has a point. He's the new president of one of the teaching unions and has said that maths should be dropped in favour of more creative subjects.

Clearly, he's fed up with trying to hammer sins and co-sins into utterly blank brains and who can blame him?

But he is still, I think, arguing for numeracy - which is much more important and vital to just about every aspect of our everyday lives.

Instead of "creative" subjects - do today's children actually need any more self-expression? - maybe we should be more worried about our feeling for numbers. Many of us have only a tenuous grasp and yes, of course, it's made much worse by our reliance on calculators and computers.

In the fifties, we started our days with half an hour of mental arithmetic and a board rubber round the head if you couldn't instantly snap the answer to eleven elevens. Let's hope teaching methods have moved on since then.

But we have young doctors who give 100 times the right dose of medicine - because they can't understand decimal points. Barmaids who without their till couldn't tell you how much for two pints of lager and a packet of crisps. Ever more youngsters are up to their eyes in debt because they simply don't understand what they're paying in interest. How do we expect people to budget when they can't even add up?

And one of the saddest sights I've ever seen was in a furniture showroom where a young couple was trying to work out if a sofa would fit into their sitting room. They had the measurements but didn't have a clue.

A quadratic equation might not have helped them, but simple arithmetic might.

In the Olden Days, if we weren't up to O-level maths, we did something called special arithmetic instead, which was seriously hard sums.

So let's drop maths by all means, but only if we bring back arithmetic.

Then we might get the sofa into the sitting room - and work out how much it's costing us.

Some people were shocked that the Schumacher brothers, complete with black arm bands, raced just hours after their mother's death.

Well, why not?

Racing is what they do, what, presumably, their mother brought them up and encouraged them to do. And not racing wouldn't have brought her back.

We all cope with grief in our different ways, and tackling a tricky job is one of them.

And maybe, at the back of their minds, they even thought that if they carried on as normal that it would seem that life hadn't changed, that she hadn't really died, and would still be there, smiling congratulations, when they finished.

Published: ??/??/2003