Picture the scene:
It's a little over six years ago. Mrs B-V and I have decided we're going to move out of London and are house-hunting in the East Surrey area.
One of the important factors in our search is having a good pub nearby. A pub where we can get to know the locals and make it a key component of our day-to-day lives and, crucially, a pub where there will be ever-changing cask beer that will allow me to easily indulge my hobby - nay, my lifestyle - as a ticker.
"I'm no 44.5 kilogram weakling but I always go the extra 1609 metres. I'll continue to drink the occasional 568 millilitres and eat 113-grammers until I'm 183 centimetres under..."
It's been in the what-passes-for-news-these-days recently that retailers might, at some point, be given the option to use Imperial measurements when selling us apples and dried pulses and pork scratchings or whatever we want to buy.
You know, pounds, ounces, maybe even hundredweights if you're buying something absolutely fucking massive.
We won't know exactly what these measures will look like, if indeed anything changes at all, until we see the result of the consultation, but the gist of it is that nobody is going to be compelled to do anything differently - this would, in all likelihood, actually represent a relaxation of the current legislation (with its origins, predictably, in the EU) which forces retailers to use metric, whatever the context.
Tomorrow marks the beginning of the double Bank Holiday and some sort of 'Jubilee' celebration, apparently one of such Platinumness that the likes of it will ne'er be seen again in our lifetimest.
Anyway, it is perhaps more notable because I have yet to drink a single Jubilee-themed ale this time. Not a single one. And, believe me, if I'd found some available I'd have purchased and consumed them.
Was it really ten of the Queen's Whole Years ago that I blogged about the Diamond Jubilee and imparted fairly disparaging reviews of the beers brewed to mark the occasion?
Why, yes. Yes, it was. I've been around longer than a decade. Who'd have thought it?
