Now I may not have got a cake or candles, but the day after this broadcast I got a letter from the Head of BBC Radio Scotland, who had heard what I had said and had taken the trouble to write and say nice things about my contributions over the years. So there you are - I always wrote these things assuming that they would vanish on the winds, and indeed they do, but you never know who might be listening in before they fade away.

Now today may seem like any other day, but for me it’s a little bit special. This is my hundredth Thought for the Day, though being the BBC, I didn’t expect and didn’t get a cake and candles. Strange how those zeros change the nature of things, making landmarks out of a couple of big fat nothings.

They may prompt a standing ovation at a cricket ground, or a telegram from the Queen, but the transition we make at such a point is nothing real, it’s just the zero suggesting an imaginary change of state. In fact, the West would have no zero if the muslims hadn’t found one in India and passed it on. Europe would still be using Roman numerals, but we never got thanks for nothing.

So we use the zero as a cause of celebration, the Festival Hall had a gala for its 50^th birthday yesterday, but we also use it for obfuscation, to perplex and bewilder, round numbers sometimes making things seem usefully less real. Six thousand jobs may go at Corus, but what makes it really real is if yours happens to be just one.

And now with an election on the way, numbers used for bewilderment are about to truly come into their own. For in this country we take a dim view of politicians telling lies or damn lies, but they’re still allowed to use statistics, the ultimate dark art of making numbers mean what you want them to.

And over the Atlantic George Bush has celebrated his hundred days with not just a party but a promise of Starwars. So now we can look into the night sky, with its numbers beyond our imagining and measurement in light years, and meditate on human consequences that are sanitized for us in terms of megadeaths. Still, don’t worry, that’s really not big numbers. It’s just little numbers with lots of zeros.

Qur’an says: “Apart from God, you have no protector or mediator. Will you not remember? He directs the affair from heaven to earth, then it goes up to Him in one day, the measure of which is as a thousand years of your counting.”