Opinion

On several recent occasions, I was asked by a number of my friends to give my opinion on some complicated business.

As you expect, my standard answer is I do not need to have an opinion on this matter. 

Of course, the flaw of this statement is, like medical knowledge, we have a whole lot of opinions that we don't actually need, and, for this very topic, I have several and probably conflicting ideas. I shall explain them in the coming days by my usual convoluted way, and, by doing so, I suspect I could achieve the impossible mission of offending all parties.

And, following Baruch Spinoza, who tried to solve ethical and metaphysical questions by mathematical means, I shall begin by considering our in-house problem by simple arithmetic.

PS. If you do not know what topic I'm referring to, just sit back and consider my discussion from a metaphysical point of view.