Thousand

Still, I digress. Thousand. A thousand pounds is a lot of money to spend on buying a book, very little for a second-hand car, nothing at all for a house. For many London residents, it's two and a half months worth of rent. After tax, it is the average monthly income of an adult human male in Wales. In that respect 'thousand' is still quite a popular measurement, but a depressing one. Nietzsche's ubermensch did not earn money, as money is a depressing thing. Rather like Kentucky Fried Chicken, as soon as you have some, you want more, and the more you have, the worse it is for you. Many is the time I have painfully shuffled my bloated, sweating, shivering frame from KFC, all the way home, only to curse myself for allowing such a lapse. Chicken is supposed to be healthy, but I was much happier before I discovered fast food. Life seemed nicer then, before those long nights of sitting in a neon-lit, glass-walled enclosure, watching the world grow dark outside whilst plowing through another box of nuggets, my dwindling bank balance testament to one thing - I need to be stopped.

Money makes me think of the people who congregate in the All Bar One near Liverpool Street Station, happy faces in their smiling suits, unaware of the badly-dressed stranger watching them and wondering why the people who fired a rocket at the MI6 building did not fire it here, where there is glass and wood, side-streets to duck behind, and people more genuinely deserving of injury and death. Anyway. Computer memory has long since surpassed the kilobyte, and although cache memory is still measured in KB, it's only a matter of time before the MB barrier is broken. There are very few elements of the human body which exist in the thousands - organs number in the dozens, bones in the hundreds, and blood cells and so forth number in the millions. Thus, on a human scale, thousand has no meaning. We don't have a thousand fingers, it's hard to count to a thousand without appearing odd, it's impossible to hold a mental image of a thousand objects, and we are all unlikely to know more than a few dozen people by name.

'Million' makes nice shorthand for any large amount, and 'hundred' seems a lot less of an exaggeration than 'thousand'. To proclaim that one is being attacked by thousands of angry bees seems hyperbolic, even though the average honeybee nest may contain several thousand drones, because we associate the number thousand with exaggeration and untrustworthiness. Despite the noble appearance ('thou' conjuring images of the Bible and Shakespeare, and 'sand' reminding one of the deserts of Egypt and the cradle of civilisation), thousand is a suspicious number, an number that spreads dissent and is actively plotting against the other numbers. It is the James Bond of numbers, the rusty metal claw in a suede glove, the thousandth column, the number of lies.