God knows I’m no stranger to not knowing what I’m talking about, but one of the vexing things about the financial crisis has been realising just how unremarkable my position is. I thought society could sustain me because I was an aberration, and the main swathe was well-informed. In fact, we all thought someone else had it covered. Blarney has become our only currency, its value massively overinflated, and we have been heading for an almighty reckoning, in which no one knows what they’re talking about at all, for ages. In this regard, I find myself increasingly empathetic to the bankers who created the crisis in the first place, though, as understanding goes, it is that far and no further.

Go on, go and find someone you consider an expert: perhaps they have a grey beard, and are a man or a stern lady. “What’s the worst that could happen?” ask him or hairy-her. “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” they’ll say. Let’s say the banking system collapses.

“The economy would come down with it,” the British chancellor (finance minister) Alistair Darling told the BBC. No, but sir . . . you’re helpful and that, but how is the economy different from the banks? Does the economy keep its money in the bank? Has it a mattress? Does it run a cashless system? Can an economy have debit cards? When they accuse you of writing a blank cheque, what bank are you using, exactly? What exactly is a trillion? Yes, yes, I know what it is , I have got Google, you know. Ours is a logical system (unlike the Americans’, though they have other things going for them), so a UK trillion has three times as many zeros as a million. But how big is that, really? Is there a number of zeros below which you can just write it off, chalk it up to experience - like buying a car and crashing it on the way home, before you’ve insured it, and even though that is quite a hit, ladies and gentlemen, you nevertheless still have somewhere to live, and something to get up for in the morning.

Is, say, 29 billion just a macro-version of your lovely blue car? And is there a number of zeros, say 29 trillion, which cannot be

written off, and then the whole country goes

bust and gets cholera? Maybe you think it’s the wrong time to criticise, but it strikes me that when there’s a very simple concept, such as salt content, nobody is keener than a modern government on devising a handy pictorial system of representation, like traffic lights. And yet, something genuinely hard comes along, in which none of the vocabulary is self-explanatory, and where, mateys, are your arresting, easy-to-understand visual aids now? I personally favour a wild-animal metaphor.

Say you’re watching the news, on the telly, and in that red strapline that Sky uses to misspell summaries, there is a little animated everyperson, bestriding a jungle path. Interest rates go down? He meets a chinchilla: double-edged beast; can bite him (painful deflation) or he could kill it and eat it . Two trillion pounds lent to banks, fails to stanch open wounds, immediately need two more trillion? Perhaps our chap meets a tiger. Or an angry man with a machine gun.

I just need a sense of scale, a set of extremes, two poles in the snow and a tiny hint of what they represent, and how far they are apart. Then it’ll be bluffing - sorry, business - as usual, which is what, people, this economy needs. — The Guardian