A really big thing is several times the size of some big things. Get it?

According to new research just released by the University of Georgia, we have produced eight billion tons of plastic since we first really took to mouldable polymers in the Fifties. To put that in perspective, the researchers explained that this is the weight of one billion elephants, 80million blue whales or 822,000 Eiffel Towers.

In case that has not made it quite clear – a blue whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant, an elephant weighs 8.3 billion tonnes divided by 1 billion, which is roughly two thirds of a double decker bus, and a grain of sand made of matter from a neutron star (the densest known material outside the infinite density of a black hole, of course) would weigh as much as three Eiffel Towers, and an Eiffel Tower made of neutron star matter would be able to crush all that plastic to the size of a grain of sand.

My point is that someone, somewhere along the line forgot what comparisons are supposed to do – namely, make things more, rather than less, comprehensible to our tiny, dismal human minds and our (despite what Hollywood film-makers would have you believe) heavily circumscribed imaginations.

It happens all the time. The giant berg that has just broken away from one of Antarctica’s ice shelves was described as a quarter of the size of Wales, four times the size of greater London, “a trillion tonnes”, and you’d be hard put to decide which of these is least useful. The 8million hectares of rainforest we lose every year is the size of North Carolina, the Czech Republic or over half a million Hyde Parks, depending on who’s reporting it.

The formula “really, really big thing is the size of many other really big, and yet smaller than the really, really big thing, things” is no help to anyone. Just as we feel most comfortable when art and architecture obeys the golden ratio and doesn’t become gross or distorted, so we need our comparisons to bring things down to a human scale. Anything unanchored to it makes us feel lost and, soon after that, angry.

Our weights and measures are important to us. Let us not forget that Brexit was basically seeded in the rage induced by the lost right to sell potatoes by the pound, the amount that fits in to an honest, English hand, while the other holds an equally honest pint. The referendum race was always going to those who promised a return to a land where you literally knew where you stood – in a rood. Whose distance was measurable in furlongs and perches from the great house and whose wheat yield was measured in bushels, albeit by Normans who then took most of it.

We need a new set of measures to make us feel safe once more. Time could be reckoned in London underground minutes (180 seconds unless you specify a Northern Line minute, which is four hours), lengths in post office or self-service till queues (20 yards unless someone’s trying to buy wine or a reduced pie), and weight by past/current Soames’s gastric units.

Or perhaps our time would be better spent relearning the old systems for a post-apocalyptic world (three hens for a piglet as you barter on the streets). Depending on how this whole iceberg-breakingoff-and-the-globe-chokingon-plastic-thing plays out, you may end up offering your home for a handful of drought-resistant seeds, or your first-born for a place in a bunker half the size of a double decker bus.