Toby Neal: Finding a use for London buses and other useless stats

So a new ship might be the length of so-and-so London buses, a skyscraper might be the height of 20 Nelson's Columns, and a solar "farm" would be described as being the same size as, say, 50 football pitches.

Times change, and the London buses now seem to be rusting away quietly and Nelson's Column lies increasingly unused and soiled by the predations of the virtual pigeons, although the football pitches have not yet reached obsolescence and do get trotted out from time to time.

Nevertheless a window of opportunity has arisen to find new imagery to help readers grasp the scale of the information being laid before them.

Let's start with the national debt. If Doctor Who was to jump in the Tardis, and travel back in time one year for every pound of the UK national debt, what era would our favourite Time Lord find himself (or herself, depending on his/her incarnation at the relevant time) journeying back to?

He, or she, would whizz past the age of the dinosaurs, hurtle beyond the beginning of life on Earth, and to the time of the Big Bang – and still the journey would be nowhere, nowhere, near complete.

That's because the national debt is £2,500 billion. The Big Bang was a mere 13.8 billion years ago.

Levels of immigration are a key issue currently tearing the various wings of the Conservative Party apart.

Here's a way to look at UK net migration. If 745,000 men, women, and children, were to lie down head to toe in a line which began in Wolverhampton city centre, the last person in the line would be as far away as Marseilles in France (or any other place of your choosing which is around 700 miles away as the crow flies).

Waiting lists. The number of people waiting more than a year for treatment in England is just under 397,000. That's considerably more than the entire Allied landing force on D-Day.

And more people have flown to the Moon than have flown to Rwanda under the government's asylum policy.

...............

My greatest wish this Christmas? To protect the young from harm.

People like Nella, from London, who had a traumatising experience recently.

She was cruelly and recklessly exposed to the diversity of people, opinions, and mindsets which make up the United Kingdom.

This was a new low for the producers of I'm A Celebrity. As viewing figures were down, it must have been a big switch-off for younger people to watch dinosaurs like Fred and Farage dealing with their differences by the outmoded old ways of debating and having reasoned argument, rather than pulling down the blinds and shutting the door on each other.

But stuck in the jungle, Nella could not get away, until she was voted out in an act of kindness and compassion.

After her merciful escape, she said: "I’m not usually put in situations where I’m around people that don’t have like the same kind of walk of life as me so when we have different mindsets and I hear them I’m shocked because I’m like why do people think like this. I’m just like automatically I have to say something about it because to me it’s shocking sometimes."

Sympathies will be with Nella. But would a solution not be to get out a bit more?

................

At the end of the festive period last year I made a meticulous list of where all the Christmas stuff had been put away. Tree in loft, baubles in garage, lights in shed, and so on.

It was a piece of far sightedness to ensure that I didn't waste time rooting all over the place this year.

Unfortunately I can't remember where I put the list.

....

Sorry, tiresome hobby horse time again. A news item from this week. "The UK economy shrank by more than most economists expected in October."

THEN WHY DO PEOPLE CONTINUE TO TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY?