Last month I deplored the unfathomable regulatory maze into which accounting rules have descended, noting its utter irrelevance to stakeholders’ needs. There are now vast tracts of clutter in company reports that leave little room for anything potentially useful, while massive sums are wasted on consultancies paid to make sense of all this useless verbiage.

Question: what do the following passages have in common? Firstly, ‘all mesons, having opposite charges that bond at the juncture point of the gluon and the antigluon in an electric dimension, are unstable and subject to destruction by passing articles, energy fluxes and particle interactions’.

Secondly, and more pertinent to accountants, ‘for this purpose, the entity’s own equity instruments do not include puttable equity instruments or instruments that include a contractual obligation for the entity to deliver a pro rata share of its net assets only on liquidation, that do not meet the definition of equity but are classified as such under IAS 32 Financial Instruments: Presentation’.

The