Hands up, who's thick

Hands up, who's thick?

That'd be me, Sir. Sorry. There's just too much I don't understand. Relativity. Spent two years on that (failed Physics degree, Kings College, London) – none the wiser, really. Apart from this memorable fact: intuitively, if you go really, really fast, your vehicle will become longer (elongated tail, picture it) and narrower (the additional length must come from somewhere, eh?). That's exactly what happens. Measurable too. Early particle accelerators that failed to account for the relativistic effects failed, and only operated when those effects were factored in. But the maths, and therefore the physics is beyond me. I'm not clever enough to follow the equations, even when explained in an idiot's step by step guide.

We had a professor at Kings. He took the first year undergraduates thermodynamics. He may as well have been taking the blue arsed baboons remedial Greek for all the good it did me. Let alone the idiot's step-by-step guide (too much for me, way too much for me) he wrote up equations that jumped from page to page, let alone line to line, then looked up, as if to say “going too fast for you, retards?”. He was part of the team that did the electro-spectrometry that revealed the structure of DNA for the first time. A brilliant man, a brilliant mind. About half the undergraduates were mumbling: “yes, actually, get on with it, we're right up to speed”. Another quarter would catch up later. Others would struggle, but eventually get to grips. I was one of two, maybe three, who were never going to get it.

But I don't understand so very, very much. The vast majority of observable phenomena, I don't understand. How are men with AIDS raping babies in the mistaken idea that that will cure them? BLISS has just finished a book reporting on the most hideous, unimaginable torture and mutilation of infants in the name of some religion or other. How does gang-raping the sister address the crimes of the brother? All the holy books are thousands of years old, yet nothing seems to have changed. The Inquisition in their current incarnation may be armed with iPads and iPhones and an iDuckingstool. Technology, science, they've moved on. Politics and religion? Attitudes seem so backward.

The head of a UK political party tweeted encouraging people to mass and protest outside the house of the gay couple turned away from a B&B. I thought this was bound to be fake. Sent from one of those false celebrity accounts. Apparently not.

On the same day that amateur observers, working with data available to the full-time astronomers, have discovered a new planet, Syria goes on the way Rwanda did, and our politicians spend their time braying at each other across a chamber over someone's comments to a policemen.

The new distant planet is in orbit, around four suns. Imagine a sky looking up at four suns. In simple terms, it shouldn't be there. The four-way gravitational pull should rue out matter coalescing to form a planet. But it has. Far from being cheesed that their model has proved inaccurate, the scientists are excited by the chance to review the planet formation theories.

Elsewhere there's no such willingness to tear up failed models and start again. Austerity isn't the way out of recession. But, once committed, there's too much political fallout from u-turns for governments to change course. There always seem to be too many distractions from the issues to tackle. I don't understand a chancelor who refers to climate change lobbyists as 'the environmental taliban' any more than I understand the resurgence of TB, whooping cough, polio, and other diseases we'd sorted out. I imagined there'd be others to take on, not old ones coming back from the dead. I don't understand how the Saville case ever got so out of hand. Over 200 victims and rising. Nope. Don't understand the world I live in.

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