For me, however, this has always been the source of much frustration. Indeed, if it had been invented back then, I’m sure I would have been diagnosed as a child with at least a mild form of dyscalculia. I remember having to sit through hours and hours of extra math lessons just to be able to do basic sums and even today I struggle. Honestly, I cannot do something like 15+7 immediately. I have to split it up in 15+5 and 20+2. I’m also notoriously bad at mixing up stuff like 97 and 79, thanks partly to the confusing Dutch system of saying zevenennegentig and negenenzeventig. (Even as I wrote this down I noticed that I had confused them).

Later on my dyscalculia developed into a very apathetic relationship to numbers in general. For instance, for someone who likes history it didn’t help, I’m profoundly uninterested in dates. I always needed a little trick just to remember them, like 1798 for the French Revolution. But the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) or the one at Actium (31 BC), two of the most iconic dates of Ancient History – a subject I took at university –, will be forgotten almost as I’m writing this down.