Dear Mr Coren,

I was delighted by your inquiry, affording me as it does the opportunity to explain a little of what I do for £216,000 per annum, to include reasonable expenses, ie, in layman’s terms, 42,204 packets of cigarettes, or, for non-smokers, 106,814 jars of family-size mustard pickle.

My task is to represent British interests on the extremely important Strasbourg Committee for Rendering Unpalatable Statistics Comprehensible to the Merest Clod. Ordinary people cannot be expected to grasp the fact that the European wine lake contains billions of gallons of unsellable plonk, especially now that the figure has by EU law to be expressed as 4.544 billions of litres. That is why the old EEC originally expressed the figure as 1 lake. It made it simpler.

Since then, however, the surplus has grown to 3.7 lakes, but because the original unit was never specified — as, for example, a one-eighth Windermere or, metrically, a 0.0365 Geneva — the lake has now been replaced by the more accurate, and euroversal, Olympic-sized swimming pool unit (OSSP). It is also clearer to laymen: British citizens can probably best envisage 16,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools by imagining them occupying a site roughly the size of Huddersfield (0.493 Dusseldorfs on the metric scale).

An OSSP is thus 0.0000625 huddersfields. This is for temporary envisagemental purposes only, since, if the lake reaches 18,000 OSSPs, it will be 0.0000625 boltons. It is clearer to stick to OSSPs.

But, you ask, just how big is one OSSP? To clarify this, let us convert the OSSP into London buses, the traditional British unit of measurement for anything larger than 2x londonbuses; older readers may recall, for example, that the funnels of the Queen Mary could accommodate 6 London buses: thus 1 QMF = 6 LBs. Similarly, Nelson’s Column being the height of 12 London buses, 1 NC = 12 LBs. The OSSP = 54 LBs.

These are, I stress, British measurements. To my Belgian colleagues on the committee, the OSSP = 288 MPs, a unit based on the Mannikin Pis, to the French it is 0.003 tourseiffels (TEs), and to the German 20 vonbrauns (VBs), this being the number of doodlebugs that would have fitted into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and so on. I understand that full conversion tables will appear in the 2007 Bumper MEP Desk Diary, and also be available online to anyone who voted in the European elections.

Yes, I hear you say, that is all crystal clear, we now totally understand the size of the wine problem, but what about the butter mountain? An excellent point, and you are right to raise it. It would be impossible to express the butter mountain in terms of OSSPs, and my colleagues and I have for several years been locked in fierce debate over viable alternatives.

The stumbling block is the concept of “mountain” itself: because while the European lake differential is not huge, the mountain disparity is gigantic. Is, in short, the butter mountain a Snowdon (ie, 23 NCs, or 286 LBs) or a Matterhorn (1,020 LBs, 17.3 TEs or 510 VBs)? The Dutch, of course, having no idea what a mountain is, are utterly flummoxed.

In consequence, following my professional advice, British MEPs have decided, pro tem, to abolish the mountain unit altogether for domestic reporting purposes, and adopt the huddersfield: by great good fortune one of the under-assistants of my senior research assistant, Miss Trevelyan, discovered that not only was the current weight of the butter mountain exactly 1,380,620 gross tonnes (a figure unimaginable to the layman), but that the present population of Huddersfield was exactly 138,062! All you and your readers need to do to envisage the size of the butter surplus is imagine everyone in Huddersfield representing ten gross tonnes of butter.

Quite where we go from here is not entirely certain: no other town in Europe corresponds so precisely to my committee’s needs, so all my fellow members are at a loss as to how to convey the size of the butter mountain to their countrymen. Something of a British triumph, then — and one I trust you will bear in mind when it next comes to casting your Eurovote.