Without decent maths, it is almost impossible to understand the latest fuss about how nobody has decent maths. Still, I'm trying. According to a report by Reform, a “lost generation” of 440,000 has been put off studying maths since 1989, at a cost to the economy of £9 billion.

In other words, every time somebody gives up maths after GCSE, the economy loses out to the tune of... hang on, I think there's a calculator on my mobile. Remind me, how many is a billion? Ah yes. So, I divide that, and each year...

Ah, bugger it. Haven't a clue. Because I, you see, am one of that “lost generation”. I gave up maths in 1993. I didn't realise I was part of a national disaster. It was those griddy numbery things that did it. You know the ones? They lived in groups of six, and in brackets, and you had to intimidate and cajole them into leaving one set of brackets and joining another, even if they had looked perfectly happy and at home in the first one. I couldn't tell you why. It made every day feel like Monday afternoon. It was ghastly.

I quite enjoyed maths at GCSE. It was only afterwards that it went weird. Reeling tedium of the sort you just don't have to deal with as a grown-up, unless you go to party conferences. It just didn't seem a sensible way to spend my time. So I dropped it, and took up history.

I wonder, what does Reform reckon I would have done in life if I hadn't? Discovered cold fusion? Found a new shape for the wheel? Invented the robot elk? Or would I, in fact, just have been the kind of journalist who knew what matrices were but had to use Google if you asked him about Bismarck? Answers below. No calculators.

Apparently, GCSE standards have “declined markedly” in the past 20 years as questions have become “more accessible”. In other words, teaching has started to focus on the mathematics that people actually need in order to live their lives, rather than the maths they might need if they fancied making an A-bomb, say, or building the Hoover Dam. This, sighs Reform, means that UK banks and institutions must employ mathematicians from India and China. Not us. We're “lost”.

I don't buy it. It's not easy GCSEs that stop British kids from wanting to study maths, while Indian and Chinese teenagers beaver on. It's a host of factors, and many of them have much to do with the many reasons why, frankly. Britain must be a much nicer place to be a teenager than India or China.

In fact, aren't they the “lost generation”? They're working thousands of miles from home, for somebody else's economy. We just didn't fancy maths. Why is that so hard to understand? It's exactly the opposite of rocket science.

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