It recently occurred to me that I really don’t understand anything. If I had to round up the amount of stuff in the world as a whole that I understand, to the nearest decimal point, it’s probably about 0.001%. And that’s being generous.

Take the foilbles of human behaviour for a kick off. For example, why do the sorts of people who get blacked out windows in their cars to protect their identities from prying eyes (footballers, club promoters, gangsters, bell-ends) also get personalised number plates? Do they actually stand in car dealerships having conversations like:

“Can I get the windows blacked out please- don’t want everyone to know it’s me driving by”
“And the license plate, sir?”
“Can I get R10 FERD please?”

If so, I really don’t understand that. And that’s just the little stuff. What about gravity? I know what it does; but why it does it or how? Nope, not a clue. Don’t understand.

The problem is that when you start thinking like this then, much like spilled shampoo, you can’t ever put your thoughts back in the bottle. Your perception is forever changed- much like losing your virginity or the first time you wake up next to a submachine gun with a blank hole in your memory where last night should be.

Start realising you don’t understand anything and life is no longer something you can confidently skip through with cocky brio. Rather it suddenly becomes a parade of events, concepts and creatures that you can barely hope to even grasp onto the minutest comprehension of. There are plenty of people in the world who look at the average prole with arch superiority and think this level of flailing ignorance is how they exist on a daily basis. This is true, of course, but it’s also true that even the smuggest, most knowing of folk are almost exactly the same in what they really know about anything. The only difference is that a dim person is never likely to realise that they actually know bugger all and will therefore remain in blissful unintellectual simplicity. They don’t read stuff like this. You are doing. They win. Damn.

Let’s move onto the economy. Now that he’s safely installed in 11 Downing Street, alongside the panel saying “In Case of Emergency, Break Vince Cable”, George Osbourne- the bloke in the Tory party that even David Cameron refers to as ‘the posh one’- has to now stop the Government spending any money on anything. This is because the government has a huge national debt to deal with. As does pretty much every other nation on Earth. Some, like Greece, have had to borrow money off people so they can afford to pay them back some other money. This is generally the sort of behaviour associated with men who spend their entire lives in the bookies smelling of sweat and old string, rather than whole sovereign countries.

The thing I don’t understand is this- in any situation where money is owed, there’s usually a debtor, who does the owing, and a debtee who does the borrowing. However, it would appear that absolutely everyone on Earth at the moment is the debtee. Everyone owes someone some money. Lots of money. Now, who the hell do they owe it to? Who’s waiting impatiently and sending out mardy final warning letters addressed to ‘The People and Government of Spain, Spain’?

And if we can find out who this money is owed to, can’t we just all ask them to shut up and wait a while longer? Or just ignore them? After all, I’m going to hazard a guess that there’s more of us than there is of them. I’m pretty sure if we all actually knew who all this cash was owed to, that’s what we’d do. But then again we don’t know, do we? We don’t understand- none of us.

Either that, or all the people in the world who run everything don’t understand how basic economics work. And if that’s the case, then never mind vanity plates and gravity, can you even begin to understand how that happened?

No, me neither.