When I’m watching the news and the finance dude comes on and starts talking about the Nasdaq or the Hang Seng or the Footsie 100, I experience something similar to when I’ve eaten dessert too fast and my cheeks start to sweat and my eyes glaze over and my brain begins to float out the back of my head. In short, the numbers have no meaning. How could they mean something when they have no concrete grounding? When they are only ideas about what someone thinks the number is worth and how much another will spend on proving it? Give me numbers that are real I say. Numbers that come one after another and represent fixed principles of plus and minus and … the other ones. But then I find a playing card on the street; the 11 of diamonds, and all 100 footsies are kicking me in the butt.  Who ever heard of an eleven of diamonds? What happened to Jack? Why does the number eleven follow me around? Popping up on clocks and dates and lists and playing cards that aren’t supposed to exist. And it’s then that I realise that one man’s number is another man’s mystery, so Tom Petrovski can keep fumbling his way through the finance report. I’ll just be putting on the kettle and making a nice cup of tea, returning to the box just in time for the weather. Something we can all relate to on these swiftly shortening hazy Melbourne days in May.