Good to hear that Ireland has removed all the silly imperial road signs spouting stuff like ‘miles per hour’ speed limits and has properly replaced them with metric signs showing ‘kilometres per hour’.
What happened to our move in the UK to metric measurements? We were slowly phasing out that old fashioned confusing imperial rubbish, but it seems to have come to a screaming halt. For a while on TV, news reporters would carefully make sure they spoke in modern measurements “I’m standing just 50 metres from where…” and all was right with the world.
But, it’s slipping back in. Down me local market (you have to speak like that) things are sold in “payands” weight, and on TV there seems to be a conscious effort to go back to the old fashioned ways too. “I’m standing just 50 yards from where…” keeps happening.
We no longer have people talking about the price of a gallon of petrol, but correctly, people think in price per litre. This is because we swapped over to one system and stopped bothering with the old one. Equally, when I see something that costs 27p I don’t sit there with a calculator trying to find out that it’s the equivalent of 5 shillings and 8 old pennies and a farthing. Neither do I try to express it in Groats. I just think, feel and know what 27p is, buys, and looks like. No doubt if we were still running dual currency in the UK we’d all be constantly confused with the conversions back and forth and back again.
This is why things are so confused generally. We should get rid of all forms of old fashioned imperial measurement and then just think, breath and believe in metric. Ireland seems to be leading the way in so many things, where once we looked on them as some pathetic simple potato loving bums that envied the UK, it’s actually time for the rolls to reverse.
All the time people indulge the old system alongside the metric system, we will never teach people to think in kilometres per hour, or kilograms when they weigh themselves. It’s time to take action!
England's England 