Dr. Commuter helps out ... the BBC #2

Dr. Commuter writes:  Once more our favourite public service broadcaster has sought my assistance in dealing with a weighty matter. This time the stumper is a tricky financial question.

Pic: BBC Website published today

There is really nothing much to this. A billion pounds is simply one thousand heaps of one million pounds and I'm sure many of us will have some of those stacked up in our back rooms. Or, to put it another way, a million heaps of one thousand pounds each, the sort of amount we can so easily spend on a night out without really thinking about it.

I sense that for some of you this may not be enough to solve the problem. That is because you are thinking about this in the old fashioned way of imagining a huge pile of banknotes or even one pound coins stacked impossibly high. But here is another much simpler approach. No tottering heaps of paper or great towers of metal that make it impossible to open your door. Just one little piece of paper thus:

Pic: Finder.Com

If this is still a trifle overwhelming, write out a cheque for, say, one hundred pounds. Send it to me so that you can have the full experience of watching the funds leave your bank account and migrate to another. Then repeat, oh, say ten million times, and you will now surely grasp exactly what a billion pounds is as you look forlornly out of the windows at the debtors prison to which your financial ineptitude has consigned you.

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If you have any troubling questions about money, Dr .Commuter may be consulted, subject to some utterly trivial terms and conditions that you really don't need to worry about, such as handing over fees in used notes in black bin liners, the use of numbered Swiss bank accounts and the passwords to any Bitcoin wallets that you may have lying about in your online cupboards. Special terms for billionaires needing help counting their stashes. Please do not ask for credit as a refusal is a damn certainty followed by lots of jeering.