Even I am equal to the challenge of maths with this exam

That school website, Friends Reunited, is inviting its subscribers to have another go at their O-levels, retaking them in their current incarnation as GCSEs. We are offered a series of multiple choice questions, purportedly first put in the GCSE paper of 1998, and we get half an hour to complete the 15 questions (is that two questions a minute or two minutes a question?)

We were taught a very great deal of maths, all of it against our will. At primary school, well before the age of 10 we were drilled in compound interest. I can feel a shocked pause out there, but let's press on. At prep school we dabbled in primitive trigonometry, did logarithms (an immensely complicated way of turning multiplication into addition), and glanced at quadratic equations (pass).

At secondary school, I can remember sin curves somewhere in the syllabus. They ring some sort of bell. Maybe they were related to bell curves. By my O-level days I had become a maths moron (you'll be delighted to see how much I've improved). We were victims of the New Maths (Venn diagrams. Probabilities. Sets).

Our maths master enjoyed the fact that this new educational method demanded we work out each problem from first principles; there were no rules of thumb. He wanted us educated, not schooled. It works for students with ability; schooling works better for the rest of us.

Very well. But this is what our children are tested on now, if the website is to be believed. "Mrs Mason," the first question goes, "buys a giant bag of crisps. The bag contains 20 packets of crisps. There are eight Ready Salted, four Cheese and Onion, two Prawn Cocktail and two Beef. She takes out a packet without looking."

We are then asked what the probability is that the packet is Bar-B-Q flavour. The examiners temptingly suggest the answer 20 out of 20. Observing that Bar-B-Q flavour doesn't feature in the list seems to me to be more English comprehension than maths, but cross-disciplinary questions may be testing more than one knowledge base.

How about question four: "What is the next number in this sequence – 3, 7, 11, 15...?" Remember this is not for 9-year-olds Remember also that most children do poorly in maths. The average mark for this test paper, the website tells us, is 60 per cent.

Here's another question we might feel isn't overly challenging. "What is 16 squared?" There are two aids to answering this. One of the five answers listed is the correct one. And students are allowed to take calculators into the exam with them.

The first rule of algebra is Don't panic. So solve this equation without doing it algebraically: "If 3a equals 12, what does a equal?" We can all get that right with a bit of rudimentary trial and error round the bottom end of the three times table. And even the harder variant of the question isn't as hard as it looks: "If 2(c + 1) = 5, what does c equal?" This might daunt those who insist on panicking but (or so) they again give you the answers to choose from. Is it 9? 1? 25? 0.8? or 1.5? Well, try substituting each of these answers until the right one works.

That was the hardest question in the test and can be solved by pupils who have neither been schooled nor educated: they only have to slog their way through five possibilities without knowing anything.

It may be that the website hasn't fairly represented the maths exam. But at any rate, my grade six in O-level maths (if that indeed was the lowest pass grade) is now 80 per cent in GCSE.

The only exam I ever failed was a physics exam and this condemned me to the low science set that took combined physics and chemistry O-level.

Stigmatised, excluded, demotivated, I got the lowest pass grade possible.

But in the website's GCSE I got 80 per cent. I'm boasting now, I must stop.

My bet is that a 16-year-old with the ability to get the lowest pass grade in O-level Latin circa 1967 could get an A star in GCSE French today. And our leaders deny that standards have slipped in schools.

Put your money on Brown when it comes to the euro

No euro this year, they say. The experts tell us that Gordon Brown is going to declare that his economic tests have not been "unequivocally met"; no, there will be no referendum this year. What the subject says about the Blair-Brown relationship makes this much more interesting than it sounds.

The reasons for Mr Brown's euro-scepticism may be many but here are three:

(1) No economic tests can ever be "unequivocally met". There is no such thing as unequivocal in economics. The first law of economics states that for every economist there is an equal and opposite economist.

(2) The stability pact that binds all euro members means the Chancellor would have to give up control of quite a large part of the economy. He couldn't borrow as much as he liked in bad times, for instance. He wouldn't like that.

(3) Most trivial, and therefore most important, he doesn't want to inflate Tony Blair's status any further by giving him the place in history reserved for the British Prime Minister who takes us into the eurozone.

For these reasons, experts agree, Gordon and his team have been making subtly anti-euro noises over the past 12 months.

However, an equal and opposite outcome is possible. Imagine that the tests haven't been unequivocally met but have been, in the phrase you hear round the back door of the Treasury, "prospectively met". Gordon Brown could say that his tests have been sufficiently met – for those who really want to go in.

This would put Tony Blair under intolerable pressure to call the referendum – but he'd have to fight it without the active, driving support of the Treasury. As a result, he'd probably lose. It won't be a popular campaign: 60 per cent of the population are anti. Without the Chancellor's weight it would almost certainly fail. Mr Brown has it in his power to send the Prime Minister on to the guns of public opinion, just as the Iraq war has weakened the authority of Number 10.

The arguments seem very nicely balanced and as subjective as a Rorschach test. All we can say for certain is that when the decision is made, we will all nod wisely and say that it couldn't have fallen out any other way.

Sitting out Down Under leads to a sunny disposition

I haven't visited the southern hemisphere for five years now, but here I am for a week. Talk about weather. Talk about hot weather and blue skies.

Talk about limpid seas and fine wine and eating outside and boating in the gulf and... but I sense you are tiring of this.

Here is my poolside confession. The chardonnay must be getting to me. I have discovered a flaw in my attitude to the efforts of well-intentioned people, to those who try to enlist government aid to "make a difference", to "make the world a better place". These people I have mocked and questioned their motives. I've accused them of manias, pointed out the unintended consequences of their actions – which can, when viewed in a certain way, be worse than the diseases they set out to cure.

However, the sun in the south has set me back on my heels. It's burning less than it did when I last felt it five years ago. In those days, there was a bite to it that we middle aged people felt to be different in quality from the sun in our childhood. It scorched us. It caused cancers, lots of cancers.

The growing hole in the ozone layer was said to be responsible, and the hole was caused by human use of certain chemical refrigerants. The use of these CFCs was reduced by government action, and recently, the hole has been observed to be shrinking. The midday sun on my thighs was warm, penetrating, delicious (I won't go on) but observably lacking in its previous radiation burn-power.

A policy has been fought for, implemented over large parts of the world, and seems to have had a vast effect on an incalculably large problem. And most bafflingly, it seems to have been the right effect. Unless anyone can restore my faith in doubt by proving that the incidence of skin cancers has taken an enormous leap forward in the last five years I shall have to change – or at least modify – my religion.