Preparing to fight the Imperial War

"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.

 

Give them an centimetre...

As far as I'm concerned, this is the sort of actually vaguely good news that is all too uncommon these days. If you've been reading this blog for a while (and if you haven't - why the fuck not? I've been doing it for well over a decade!) you'll know that I typically use Imperial units of measurement - in recipes for example. I know I'm probably in the minority of food bloggers in doing so and the number of fucks I give about that is equal to about three microlitres.

But not everyone is happy with the prospect of choice, and some spectacularly fail to understand either the point or, well, basic reality:

 

People who want imperial measurements back. Young people stayed indoors for two years to keep you alive, don’t punish them with this shit that’s not relevant to anyone under 60 (you already have Brexit)

— Richard K Herring (@Herring1967) June 12, 2022

...somehow managing to conflate Imperial Measurements with both Brexit and COVID in a single Tweet as if the issues are somehow intrinsically connected and entirely without nuance, with nobody capable of forming an individual view.

I'm ten years younger than Richard Herring, who is far closer to 60 than I am and, in my case at least, it simply isn't true. But then Mr. Herring is already popular enough to get away with being both wrong and highly insulting. I probably have to justify myself a bit more.

So: I'm not some old person from a bygone age who doesn't like change and prefers what they know because that's what they know (well, OK, to some extent I probably am, but that's not the point on this occasion).

I was born in 1977 and at primary school in the early 1980s I was taught metric. Litres. Metres. Even Hectares at one point. 

But it didn't really stick. 

Some sort of ghastly metric quantity, I'll warrant

Outside of the classroom, we bought 'a quarter' of sweets, people were weighed in stones and their penises measured in inches.

You could say I was in a strong position to make a genuinely informed choice, having both Metric and Imperial around me. And, for the most part, I chose - and continue to choose - Imperial. 

I'm fine with Metric where it makes more sense - at Athletics tracks and in the laboratory, for example - but for food and drink and everyday 'life' Imperial measurements just instinctively seem right to me. 

Yes, I can sort of visualise bags of crisps (25 to 50) and chocolate bars (50, 100, 200) in grams because we've been confronted with these on the packaging for my entire life, but I still 'think' in ounces and inches. And, just as importantly, I 'feel' in those units too, if that makes sense. I know that a pint of beer is supposed to be 568ml - and I have no problem with using the precision of metric to ensure that remains the case - but I'd feel pretty damn cheated if we moved to half-litres. 

I know that I'm a fraction of an inch under six foot tall, and that works out at 182 cm - but don't ask me to mentally picture a person who is 205 or 143 cm. 6'6" or 5'3" wouldn't be a problem though.

And the one I really cannot ever get head around is Centigrade weather! God knows I've tried so hard to understand it, but I just really, really love it when it's about 63 degrees, and have no idea what that would be under any other system or how other, more distant measurements would relate to it. 

All of which is perhaps a roundabout way of telling Richard Herring to fuck the shit off and stop presupposing he can accurately speak for my generation!

The thing is, why can't we have more than one system and let consumers and suppliers pick and choose what they're comfortable with? And, importantly, to ignore the bits about which they do not care. We have more than one official language in this country after all, and few give a ffyc about it!

It doesn't have to be enforced in law - just a bit of fucking common sense will do. In fact, when you start using the law as a weapon of force you get the sort of nonsense you see in Wales where all the road signs and all official documentation has to have both English and Welsh language.

I'd bet a great many Guineas that there are far more people who natively use Imperial measurements than who natively read in Welsh! 

I just want freedom of choice. I'm not demanding the right to enforce my preferred system on you - just that I get to continue to use it and a hope to cling to that a greengrocer or confectioner who wants to join me is permitted the agency to do so.