The exit from the EU could surely allow a return to Avoirdupois?
Measurements have defined us for years and, while cubits and hands had their places, writes Iain Robertson, there are many European decimal weights, amounts and sizes that confuse even the younger generations and, yes, it is a motoring issue.
Perhaps the most academic measurement of them all is miles per gallon (MPG)? While sat-nav manufacturers would love us to deal in kilometres, our 5,280 feet, or 1,760 yards, creates the perfect mile. Fuel companies, controlled by litres sold through retail pumps but governed by the EU give all of us a nightmare, when it comes to calculating MPG, which (if fitted) is performed almost accurately by the vehicle’s on-board computer.
You see, as a nation that ‘went decimal’ a little more than 50 years ago (15th February 1971), although a form of simple, divisible-by-10 metrication did take place around six years earlier (although the florin, at ten to the Pound, did arrive in the middle of the 19th Century), we have always had difficulty with it. We can handle a quantity of miles and the consumption of a single gallon of fuel but the EU-standard of litres-per-100 kilometres does not come naturally. The mental gymnastics involved in dividing the literage by 4.54 and the distance by 62.4mls is mind-boggling. However, every motor retailer has been instructed by the EU to display every new vehicle’s ‘efficiency rating’, under pain of penalty, by way of both bar chart and (more recently) its WLTP fuel consumption rating.
We all know the issues related to weights and measures…we still talk of ordering a pint, or few, of lager, or milk, (not litres) and a pound of steak (not kilogrammes). Some measurements come naturally but only because they do not seem to matter, which means that we can tolerate a 25kg sack of potatoes, because we only ever need a handful of spuds at a time; accuracy is not as vital. However, while continental travel can be amusing, because road sign kilometres increase/decrease quite speedily at a less than two-thirds conversion rate compared with miles, the inside edge of an analogue speedometer offers a convenient kilometric read-out and, if your vehicle has a digital speedometer, switching it from MPH to KPH is usually a simple button-push affair.
Mind you, I can recall a fairly elderly lady, who ran a pub in the Scottish coastal town of Montrose. She objected so heartily to the decimalisation of British money that, for almost 20 years after, until the day she passed away, she would prefer shillings but accepted pence, giving change in ‘old money’, even though it sometimes cost her the profits. The transaction was so quirky that most of her bemused customers left the older currency habitually on the counter. However, various greengrocers have reacted over the years, baring their teeth in favour of pounds (lbs) and ounces (oz), rather than relenting to resentful kilogrammes.
Should your car tyres need to be reinflated, while it may notionally be better to memorise a smaller number of pressure bars, a great many of us prefer the pounds per square inch pressure reading (lbs/in2), which has as much tangible meaning as pounds feet squared (lbs ft2), when referring to the twist energy, or torque output of an engine. Talking of which, the EU quite likes PS (Pferdestaerke; German for horsepower) when relating about an engine’s overall potency output. It is a strange rating and is around 3 units greater (although it is not a linear relationship) than the brake-horsepower (BHP) methodology. Yet, to complicate it further, the EU likes to rate the energy of engines in Newton-metres (Nm), which actually means sweet Fanny Adams, when compared with the aforementioned and more elementary lbs ft2.
On the subject of currency, prior to decimalisation, 480 ha-pennies (half-pennies) produced from cupro-nickel constituted one Pound (£1); 240 pennies (d), 80 bronze thrupenny bits (3d), 40 silvered sixpenny pieces (6d, or tanners), 20 shillings (s), or 8 half-crowns (2s/6d) also equated to a single Pound Sterling. Okay I shall accept that it would create a nightmare to reintroduce such coinage today but you could buy 239 penny chews at your local sweet shop and still have 1d change!
Although not many of us make a regular depth check of the lubrication oil in our car’s sumps (usually instigated by a confusing amber oil level warning lamp on the dashboard), we replenish it in litres, with scarcely a second thought, but that is largely because we seldom think that a finite measurement is needed. Oil is a bit like spuds in that respect and the same applies to filling the windscreen washer bottle and topping it up with screenwash fluid. Yet, while I could seldom get my head around fluid ounces, quarter, half and full pints (you may even recall the third of a pint bottles of free milk consumed by schoolchildren a few years ago), as components of a gallon (of which eight pints is the defining measurement), they have visual, as well as mental memorable appeal.
We drive on the left. We are not quaint (unless you reside in leafy Oxfordshire) but we are quirky. We used to call our country Great Britain, before the Glaswegian bar-brawler Sturgeon and her former chum, Salmond (‘Show us on the dolly, Nicola, where he touched you!’) decided to break-up the union, and I do feel that our measuring media are intrinsic to that greatness. While that woman would gleefully and mindlessly sell off my homeland for a sack-full of Euros, which would really complicate trips o’er the Border, I am of a belief that the backlash would be substantial.
Finally, shoe sizes are probably the most complex to master. If, like me, you need UK size 13s, apart from the actual difficulty of acquiring them in the UK, if I go ‘stateside’, I need to request US size 14, or from Europe size 48. However, the Japanese equivalent is 32 and the Australian is 13½…perhaps we would be better not to go there! I realise that it is wistful thinking that has led me down a much-visited garden path but some standardisation of weights and measures might not go amiss, as we explore a great country without an EU hangover.