On a scale of ‘Yakety’ to ‘Sax’, how much do you like Benny Hill? It depends on the measurement, I guess. Or rather, the calibration. For ‘Yakety’ might mean: “Why yes, Col, Benny’s bawdy mix of turbo-charged titillation, gauche goofery and broadbrush cultural satire is right up my alley.” While ‘Sax’ may mean: “Hill’s inane, unreconstructed and objectifying crudities have me harrumphing into my porridge – and as such they’re fit only for fools. Or the French; who absolutely loved him, btw. Maybe it was the beret.

Then again, it might be the other way around. Who knows or dares to dream? Me, that’s who. Yes, I dare to dream. Because when I’m not waking up screaming – which happens way too much for a geezer my age – punching the air in terror, my mind does drift off into the world of measuring my worth (careful, it’s not that kind of show, folks). Yes, worth. I won’t bore you with the details – only my therapist has that privilege. But I can hint at what they often hit you with, if or when you hit a bump in the road along life’s highway.

Trigger warning: I’m going to talk about mental health for a wee bit. So maybe skip this para if the SSRIs haven’t kicked in for today yet. But yeah, there’s a scale they use to gauge how you’re feeling called a CORE-10, featuring questions like: ‘Over the last week, how often have you felt panic or terror?’, with a multiple-choice response between 0 and 4, including the quite wonderful option of ‘1. only occasionally’. Such a sedate response to overload. “I only occasionally wish to run into the street, screaming.”

But hey, the scale is only doing its job. And we can’t blame it any more than we can blame water for being a bit on the damp side. But after a chance conversation about calibration with my pub pal at The Cask and Barrel the other week (a sage fellow called Raymond; great guy, provided you don’t mention ‘Albert Kidd’ in his presence), I started thinking on how scales have stopped making sense. Yep, this crazy world has gone a bit David Byrnean. And no amount of shoulder-padded suitery is enough armour against it.

Except… ‘understanding’ is often the greatest weapon for overcoming fears. Hence, we calibrate. In all kinds of ways. Like the Beaufort Scale for wind speed. And, unrelated, although it ought to be from a proctological POV, the Bristol Stool Scale for turd consistency. Or, my personal favourite, the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, created by and named for entomologist, Dr Julian O. Schmidt, who subjected himself to insect stings, so to rank their severity, including using the most wonderfully evocative descriptions.

It would be rude to go on without airing some of Schmidt’s poetic paeans to pain (try saying that after a Bullet Ant jabs your big toe). Like his account of the unpleasantness of being stung by Vespula Pensylvanica – that’s the Western Yellow Jacket to you and me: “Hot and smoky. Almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” But a mere hors d’oeuvre. Towards the top end of the scale is the sting of the Tarantula Hawk Wasp, Pepsis grossa, described by the Schmidt as: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has just been dropped into your bubble bath.”

Now that’s a scale – said in the voice of Paul Hogan in that iconic mugger scene from Crocodile Dundee. But seriously, Schmidt does something remarkable in that index: understanding meets empathy meets insight. Some threesome! Pity it’s a rarity in some other quarters of life these days, where things have most definitely gone right off the scale. Because while, in the past, I was proud to identify with so many people ‘on the left’, after the bile of late from some who should really know better, I part ways.

Specifically, when in response to the atrocity of conflict (that need not speak its name – it’s the only one in the room for most folks these days), we seek to selectively cherry-pick, manipulate and distort definitions of racism, in a way that is itself racist. It’s off the scale for pernicious sophistry – and, sadly, at the service of a thinly veiled hate on a particular minority that, if practised on other more ‘fashionable’ groupings, would rightly be seen as nothing short of right-wing thuggery, hiding behind a ‘cause’, so to demonise.

But hey that’s horseshoe theory for you; the idea that on a scale of left to right, they eventually meet around the back. A real stinger that perhaps even Mr Schmidt couldn’t even begin to properly describe. Maybe, we need some kind of antidote. And fast.