Dear Agony actuary

Dear Agony actuary
 
This morning I awoke from troubled dreams to find that at Ye Annual Dinner Of Ye Rosie-Nosed Actuaries last night, I foolishly bet Sir Wilkin Gimble £500,000 that I would win the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries tweeting competition. It closes end October (prize determined by the IFoA Council) and the task is to tweet an answer
to "What does an actuary do?"

I do not have £500,000, and I do not have a Twitter account!
Please help.

Yours
Name and address supplied

P.S. I feel like I have an angry woodpecker inside my head

Oh dear, you are in a pickle. And the woodpecker is the least of your troubles.

On reading your letter, my first thought was that there was one obvious solution open to you - bribe the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries Council.

On further investigation, however, I have concluded this to be a no-go option, as that august body (it's October now, surely? - Ed) comprises upright citizens of the utmost incorruptibility. They might have FIFA after their name, but there the similarity ends.

With the exception of one particularly dodgy character, one Mr Chumanorwa, who is not only well known to the police but is on first-name terms with most of them. He has a crime list as long as Richard Osman's arm, and you could bribe the man to accept any old nonsense, but the rest of them, no.
And so, unless you are prepared to extend yourself to kidnapping, that is not an option.

I would say don't kidnap the Council, as that is fraught with professional as well as personal danger. I happen to know that Colin Wilson is a seventh Dan black belt in karate, and once threw a mugger off London Bridge and onto a passing barge. So, on balance, you're basically going to have to write a really good tweet. And that can be hard, I know. Not everyone has my own ability to stay focused upon the matter in hand, and not get distracted by irrelevancies.

So here are four top tips for how to write a good tweet.

1. Quit your jibber-jabber!
You are not writing to the letters page of The Times or giving an address at Prime Minister's Questions, so drop superfluous throat-clearing and get straight to the point. You are not Geoff Boycott scoring a meditative 23 undefeated before lunch on the opening day of the Test Match; you are Alex Hales trying to score 1.4 runs per ball in a Twenty20. Get
straight to the point.

2. Hashtag
Nope, this isn't the day on which Germans celebrate cannabis, a 'hashtag' is denoted - # - and you plonk it on the end of your message to show what you've just tweeted about. So if this article were a tweet I would probably end it with #litigious #ColinWilson #ManyApologiesKelvin.

3. A single solitary snappy home truth
Your tweet must contain one true thing, which hasn't been expressed in that way before. Otherwise you are like those dreadful people who post inspirational quotes on Facebook. Most of which seem to be blatant contradictions: "The only thing I know is that I know nothing", "Only superficial people don't judge things on their appearance", "Once you accept that nothing makes sense, everything begins to make sense". These people are your enemies.

4. An appreciation of the language
Looking at the bullet point above, did you read "A single solitary snappy home truth" and its awkward jerky attempt at alliteration and think "Ewwwwww!" or "Oooooooh!" or "Jeeeeeeeeeez, them actuaries"? Are you alert to the rhythms of the language? Or where to put a punctuation mark?

Basically, it doesn't matter, just get yourself on The Twitter, Name and address supplied, and use your instincts to win the £500,000.

Feel free to bounce ideas off me in the run-up to the deadline - my Twitter name is @agonyactuary.