The Only Place for Pi is Under a Good Helping of Hot Custard

I have never been good with numbers. Never. Not even a little bit.

Words? I’ve loved words for as long as I can remember. I can’t actually remember learning to read or write — it feels as though I arrived in this world already doing both, which is either a gift or a very convenient gap in my memory. Then there’s reading music. I can do that too. I can’t play any instruments very well, but I can read the notes I should be playing. I put this lack of musical ability down to being left-handed. Mr M, my super, super talented guitar man, thought he’d fix that problem by buying me a left-handed guitar. It’s a lovely guitar. I’m looking at it now. It’s still as shiny and bright as the day he bought it for me. I still can’t play the guitar.

Now numbers! Numbers and I have always had what you might politely call a complicated relationship. One that involves a cold sweat, a slightly glazed expression, and a quiet but firm wish to be somewhere else entirely. Day-dreaming is my super talent when I’m surrounded by numbers. Or even if numbers are anywhere near me.

I say this not as an excuse, but as a fact. And more importantly, as a reminder — to you and to myself — that not being good at something doesn’t make you less of anything.

I’ve built a business, written books, run workshops, stood on stages, and helped other people publish their stories. None of that required me to be comfortable with numbers. What it required was a love of language, a stubbornness some might call determination, and the good fortune to have had at least one teacher who understood the difference between a pupil who couldn’t do something and a pupil who didn’t yet know what they could do.

That teacher was Mrs Wood.

Now, Mrs Wood had a particular quality that I found utterly fascinating, even as a teenager sitting in her classroom, understanding absolutely nothing about slide rules. (Who even thought slide rules were a good idea? I’ll wait for your answers.) She was left-handed — like me — but she could write with both hands. Both. I used to watch her in quiet disbelief. My teacher had a superpower.

But that wasn’t why I held her in such regard. The reason I never once dreaded going to maths — despite knowing with absolute certainty that I wouldn’t understand a single thing that was happening — was that Mrs Wood never, not once, made me feel humiliated. In a subject where I was hopelessly out of my depth, I always felt safe in her classroom. She had that rare and precious gift of making every pupil feel that their presence mattered, even when their quadratic equations did not. Don’t even ask me to explain that equation, but I know they exist, and I’m sure that deserves at least a mark for that.

I hadn’t thought about slide rules in decades. But here’s the thing about life — it has a wonderfully circular sense of humour.

Through my talks, my posts, and the little community that has grown up around Mother Murphy’s on Facebook, Mrs Wood and I have become friends. My old maths teacher. The woman I was in awe of at fifteen is now someone I exchange messages with, share tea and cakes with, and visit museums with. The Mrs Wood I knew then turns out to be every bit as warm and generous as the teacher I remembered. I even know what she’s really called now, but I still think of her as Mrs Wood.

It is one of those connections that makes you think the world is rather smaller and kinder than the news would have you believe.

So if you’re sitting there thinking that you could never write a book, run a business, or stand up in front of a room full of people because you didn’t do well enough at school — I would gently suggest that school was measuring the wrong things about you.

Find what you love. Do it with everything you have. The rest has a way of sorting itself out.

And as for pi?

The only place for pi, in my considered opinion, is under a good helping of hot custard.