Mathematics and I have never been the best of friends. The same mental block that causes me to invert the letters in a word or construct a sentence backwards can't make any sense whatsoever out of the way numeric formulae work. While over the years I've gradually been able figure out some basic things like fractions (you just can't do any baking unless you can figure out how many times one eighth goes into six thirty-seconds) and can sort of find my way around the circumference of a circle, anything more advanced than that and I'm lost.

On one hand it's not been any real great loss; I wasn't planning a career as an engineer or computer scientist anyway. But it's also cut me off from understanding things like the physics of light, sound, and time. I've always been fascinated by those three subjects and would have loved to have at least been able to understand what E=MC² means.

Oh, I know the words are something like energy equals mass times something squared, but that doesn't mean a thing to me. What does relativity mean anyway? What's relative to what? Did Einstein mean that time was relative to something and that something was represented by the famous formula? I've never known and no one has ever been able to explain it to me in terms that I can understand.

I know all sorts of theories about the relative nature of time but I doubt any of them have anything to do with what Albert was talking about. For example there's the time that moves at an ever-decreasing rate of speed relative to the boredom of a high school French class.

A double period that was the last class of the day in the end of May when the sun shone brilliantly bright and the sky was the colour blue you only see from inside a classroom was guaranteed to affect the speed of the clock in relation to the number of times that you looked at it. Then of course there was the amount of time that actually passed relative to the number of hours that it felt like you had been sitting in the aforementioned double period.

Of course all of us were familiar with those expressions of relativity as teenagers, and probably assumed once we had escaped the confines of school time would revert to behaving in its docile pattern of sixty seconds to a minute and sixty minutes to an hour. It just shows how naïve we were about its workings. If anything, time became even more capricious.