Counting the stock.

Today was the annual stock take in the shop. It involves a lot of counting. 
An Early Years teacher trainer once told me, ‘Counting is a very lonely business.’                                
You sit in the front of the class and count things fingers, toes, caterpillar legs, chair legs, teddy’s arms and legs, but until they get the hang of it there’s just one voice re-affirming that two does indeed follow one.

After that there are a few primary years where counting becomes a mainstream of communal participation, chanting, singing, action rhymes; in ones, in fives, in tens, in twos. Oh, the joy of being one of 30 voices counting every number, in order, in time, until the goal is reached with the triumphant yell ‘One hundred!’ Together, forever. Until suddenly, one day, it stops.

Counting becomes a silent and individual past-time, a means to a mathematical end rather than a subject in its own right. Even counting aloud to yourself is considered annoying or incompetent and is constrained to the merest of lip-movements.
 
So now, as I stock take for the shop I count the items very quietly indeed (although my lips move considerably) and in other corners of the room my colleagues are doing the same. Quietly and efficiently we fill out the boxes on our lists with counted numbers. We are working towards an end as a team but the counting itself is back to being a lonely business.