EVERY year there seems to be a report that1 university students struggle with written English.

Now it is suggested they have not even mastered basic maffs.

This does not surprise me, because I was among the trendsetting generation, who decided maffs was crap and, beyond being able to work out the cost of a yankee in Joe Coral’s, of little value whatsoever.

I mean, isosceles rectangles. Who cares?

Pi? That’s 22 over seven to you, that we used to find the area of a circle, like there was ever going to be a time when I’d need to find the area of a circle. It’s not as if I was ever going to carpet the clock, is it?

Besides pi can never decide what it wants to be, coming out at 3.1428 etc and so can never be exact. God, that’s frustrating.

If ever I did need to know the square inch-age of something big and round there’d always be a little bit I’d miss out.

You could never be absolutely right. And they say maffs is an exact science.

Now Dr Christie Marr, of St Andrew’s University, has warned even maffs students themselves are having trouble understanding numbers.

You’d think they’d have got the hang of the varmints, but I began suspecting something of the sort a few weeks back when the papers carried examples of university entrance exam questions in Britain and in China.

When I sat CSE maffs at 15 one of the questions was about a triangle, with one side measuring three inches, another four and you had to find the length of the third.

Well, it has to be five. Can’t be anything else. It was a doddle of a question.

The Chinese test involved some geometry so complicated Archimedes himself would have said, shucks, he hadn’t got a pencil handy and slunk off for an early bath.

The British test was, you’ve guessed it, the old 3, 4, 5 triangle. No actual maffematics involved.

Going back to my part in ruining the sum-doing ability of this country, I remember no-one could see the point of anything beyond simple arithmetic and no-one bothered to explain the valuable role quadratic equations might one day play in my life.

But they must have some urgent value to someone.

Things aren’t adding up for us and our problems will multiply.

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