Sometimes I feel like I’ve been living under a rock, having just emerged to find that the world has gone mad.

It’s useful if you have allergies to see ‘may contain nuts’ (or traces of nuts or whathever) on the label of a cake, especially if the cake is covered in chocolate and cream and you can’t tell by looking at it that there’s nuts inside it.

But how much can you dumb down this stuff? Packets of nuts now have labels that read ‘contains nuts’! I heard about this, and I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself. If you were allergic to nuts, would you really eat a packet of nuts if the label didn’t warn you that they were nuts? And what if you were dyslexic?

Can you imagine the court case? You’re suing Nuts Co because you are allergic to nuts, and knowing this, you ate a packet of their nuts believing that this was okay because the label didn’t say that their nuts are actually made out of nuts, just like every other nut on the planet.

If I were the judge, I would throw you in jail and drop the key in the ocean. And that’s just for being stupid.

Where do we draw the line? If you have to mention that nuts contain nuts, then I suppose you have to point out that toilet paper is made out of paper! But why stop there? Why not go back a step in the process? On the packet of toilet paper we could write: contains bits of tree.

If people with nut allergies are likely to get confused if the label on a packet of nuts doesn’t warn them that the nuts contain nuts (and that’s another thing: don’t they know what a nut looks like? If something can potentially kill you, you’d make a small effort to try and memorise what the thing looks like so that you can avoid it…)

But anyway, if there are indeed certain individuals that are likely to get confused when the label doesn’t mention that nuts contain nuts, how are they going to react when they read that the piece of tissue they’re about to wipe their undercarriage with contains bits of tree?

I say we confuse everybody and reverse engineer everything on the label. Let’s go sub-atomic: people would be dropping dead everywhere, from stupidity.

If we go back enough (or down, however you want to look at it) to the particle world, you’ll find that everything is made out of the same stuff anyway, so what do you write on the label then? Contains stardust?

And here’s another quantum conundrum: if I’m made out of the same stuff as a Mercedes-Benz, how can I be allergic to it?

And where is my badge?