Global Britain To Go Imperial?

Imperial or metric? Feet or metres; pints or litres? The overwhelming majority of countries on the planet are totally - or mainly - metric. Only Liberia, Myanmar and the United States use imperial measures exclusively (and the US version of imperial measures is not the same as that which has traditionally been used in Britain – a US pint is 83% of a UK pint, for instance). Britain naturally has to be different, and in this country we use a mixture of both, so that in a pub, beer will be sold by the pint (imperial), but wine is sold by the millilitre (metric); we sell petrol in litres, but calculate fuel consumption in miles per gallon (selling petrol in gallons again and so being more easily able to calculate MPG is actually a change I could get behind).

 

For those who supported the so-called ‘Metric Martyr,’ Steven Thoburn, the Sunderland greengrocer who was convicted for breaching EU rules banning the sale of fruit and vegetables in pounds and ounces back in 2001, Boris Johnson’s announcement last week that moves are afoot to once again make it legal to sell goods using only imperial measure will no doubt make their hearts swell with pride as the country begins to make a bonfire of Brussels bureaucracy, albeit at the cost of creating many yards (not metres) of our own, home grown, red tape.

 

And when we raise our pint in our local pub, we will be able to do so in a glass printed with the crown stamp (which was prohibited by EU directives) instead of the CE symbol. Edit: The crown symbol on glasses was NOT prohibited by the EU, I have learned since I originally wrote this. EU law does not prevent markings from being placed on products, so long as it does not overlap or be confused with the CE mark). That is if the CO2 shortage doesn’t mean that the pubs have no beer. Who really cares what’s on the side of the glass though? It could be a picture of Yoda saying, “A pint, this is,” for all I care, so long as it’s a pint!

 

As The Times mentioned when reporting these moves, they are largely (I’d say solely) symbolic, another dead cat hurled onto the table to detract from the very real issues that the country faces. And precisely who will these moves benefit? Metric measures have been legal in the UK since 1875, the country went metric in 1965, long before we joined what was then the Common Market, and imperial measures have not been taught in schools since the mid-1970s, so they will be simply a source of amusement and confusion to anyone under fifty. Perhaps the move is aimed at appeasing readers of the Daily Express, the majority of whom are in their dotage and for whom this sort of thing probably is actually quite important.

 

Pippa Musgrave, a Weights and Measures inspector, was highly critical of the idea on Twitter (you can read the thread in full here https://twitter.com/PippaMusgrave1/status/1438559713604608003), saying – among other things - that we have a shortage of weights and measures inspectors, most imperial local standards and testing equipment have long been retired, and that Certificates of approval for imperial metrological equipment have long since lapsed.

 

Boris Johnson has said of bringing back imperial measures, "People understand what a pound of apples is.” Do you know what a pound of apples looks like? I for one don’t.[1] When I buy apples I buy by number, because I need one, two, three, or four (or more): Weight doesn’t come into it.

 

It isn’t as though we really need to bring back any more imperial measures, we already use enough of them. Now, I’m not a great fan of George Galloway, but he illustrated this country’s mixed approach to weights and measures perfectly with this tweet, although the point he was making may not be the one he thinks he is:

 

If I am typical – and I think I am – we British are fairly comfortable with a mix of metric and imperial measures. I use imperial measures for my own weight – I can visualise how much I or someone else weighs in stones and pounds but not in kilos (nor just pounds for that matter, which tends to be how Americans express weight) - but I prefer kilos for cheese or meat or other foods. Pints and litres are to my mind interchangeable, especially as milk (which I still buy in pints, or quarts) is labelled in metric and imperial. I prefer miles over kilometres – if a distance is quoted in kilometres, I have to convert it – but for shorter measures, like lengths of wood, or the size of a piece of furniture, then I’m happy with either.

 

A logical extension of reverting to imperial measures could be that our athletes once again have to start competing in races over a mile, or 440 yards; that our long jumpers measure their personal bests in feet, not metres, and that the length of our swimming pools is imperialised. Chances of those things actually happening? Non-existent, but someone probably wishes they would.

 

If we are being honest, how likely is it that any retailers will suddenly start selling goods where the weight is shown solely in pounds and ounces? Not many, I'd say; perhaps the odd market trader here and there may, but, as Pippa Musgrave alluded to, for them to be able to do so legally, they will have to comply with new trading standards legislation with all the costly new bureaucracy that that entails.

 

In a similar vein to Johnson’s jingoistic call to arms on the weights and measures front, at the recent Royal Television Society conference, then Media Minister John Whittingdale announced a new plan that would make it a legal requirement for UK broadcasters to produce shows that are ‘distinctively British.'  While most commentators believed him to be referencing such shows as The Great British Bake Off, Fleabag, and Derry Girls, the more cynical among us suspect that the shows that people like Whittingdale – and Johnson, probably – were thinking of are The Dick Emery Show, Are You Being Served? Mind Your Language, and Love Thy Neighbour.

 

No doubt many of the younger generation get fed up with their parents waxing nostalgic about the 1970s, but if TV shows like those I’ve mentioned were to get remade, and if the soaring gas prices we are experiencing continue, if supply chain problems mean more and more empty shelves in the supermarkets, and if we have to start buying fruit and veg in pounds and ounces, then we’ll all be able to experience the 1970s again!

 

For a government that has previously railed against ‘gesture politics,’ Boris Johnson’s administration seems keen to indulge in such a thing quite frequently, and while it’s been said that a supposed Brexit benefit was the chance to be Global Britain again - implying an outward looking, forward thinking, dynamic nation - all we seem to be doing with announcements about crowns on glasses, imperial measures, and Britishness in TV is retreating into insularity.

 

But we’ll know what a pound of apples looks like, so that’s all good then.

 

[1] I weighed some apples in Tesco this morning to see what a pound of them looks like – it’s two, two apples.

All Our Eggs In One Basket

Last Friday I walked along the South Bank in London for the first time in over eighteen months, and it was almost as though Covid-19 had never happened. Cases – and deaths – might be just as high as last November, when we were relying on lockdown to stop numbers spiralling out of control, now the country has put its faith squarely in the vaccine programme to do the same. Social distancing and mask wearing seem to have slipped off the agenda.

On the tube up to Monument, the mask wearers were largely in the minority despite TfL making wearing one a condition of carriage. When I finished my walk from Monument to Victoria and got on another tube to take me to my destination at West Kensington, the mask wearers were firmly in the majority; perhaps central London commuters are less mask averse.

The South Bank was busy. Perhaps not as busy as it would have been on a Friday evening pre-pandemic, but busy enough, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that few pubs, coffee shops, or restaurants seemed to have closed, there were even a couple of new places that must have opened only since I was last in town.

 

There were no masks in evidence at Nell’s in West Kensington, where I went to see Fischer-Z in my first proper gig since I saw IQ in November 2019 and the first live music I have paid to see since Joe Stilgoe’s show at The Barbican in January 2020. Fischer-Z – who I first saw back in the 1970s when they supported Dire Straits – are more popular on the continent than in the UK despite founder and lead singer John Watts hailing from Surrey and now living in Brighton, and the crowd was actually quite thin, and while that must have been a disappointment for the band and the venue, it made it a comfortable reintroduction to gig going – for me, at least.

 

Unsurprisingly, drink prices have gone up since I last ventured into a pub in London, but even so, the price of a pint in The Marquis of Granby in Dean Bradley Street, just north of Lambeth Bridge, did take me by surprise a bit, coming in at £6.20, and according to the barmaid, prices are higher on Saturdays and Sundays!

 

Picture by Stephen Harris

Post-gig, it was back to West Kensington Station and the long trot back on the District Line, topped off by a half-hour walk home. By the time I got indoors, Friday had become Saturday, and my phone battery had expired, so I plugged it in to charge and went to bed.

When I got up, the only sign of life on the phone was the green LED that shows that it is fully charged. The phone would not switch on despite simultaneously pressing all the relevant buttons as suggested in the Troubleshoot section of the user manual, or any of the many YouTube videos on the subject. Clearly I needed a new phone.

I have often thought – and I’m sure this has occurred to a lot of people – that we are becoming so reliant on our mobile phones that being without one is much more than a minor inconvenience. In the last few years more and more functions and activities are possible through our phones, so by choice, or increasingly by necessity, much of the mundane, everyday stuff we do, we do with our phones. Our dependence on them has gone way beyond a social media driven habit and now, whole areas of our lives are either simplified by our being able to use a smartphone, or are massively more complex and inconvenient without one.

We pay for things with our phones, we have train tickets and tickets for shows and football matches on on them. It is now possible to have a whole day out just using a smartphone, using the Trainline app for rail tickets, an app like Ringo to pay for car parking, paying for goods and services with Google Pay, using the Wetherspoons app to pay for drinks in a pub, ordering and paying for food at Wagamama, and using a QR code on your mobile to get into a gig at The O2. All of which demands that you have a working smartphone with sufficient battery life, and a 4G signal.

On top of all that, the NHS app on your smartphone gives you access to a record of your Covid vaccination status, and regardless of what anyone says, proof of that is increasingly likely to be required in plenty of places.

 

All of which is fine and dandy – until your phone packs up, which is why I rarely go out without back-up, such as a debit card, some cash, and printed copies of e-tickets.

With my four year old Samsung Galaxy S7 now defunct, but with a phone upgrade due, I phoned my mobile provider to see what they could do. Yes, they could get me a new phone, and get it to me by Wednesday, and on a contract that I was happy with. The only problem was that the only colour phone they could get me by Wednesday was pink. A grey one wouldn’t be available till next month. I declined a pink phone and on Sunday, popped into my local Three store where they had exactly what I wanted, and on a better contract than I’d been offered over the phone.

Luckily, I was only without a phone for twenty-four hours or so and fortunately I didn’t need it for football – when Romford are at home I have the job of updating Football Web Pages through my phone, but this weekend we were away, so I didn’t have that responsibility - but my temporary inability to access my bank account online, or see my NHS COVID Pass, to name but two pieces of vital functionality, showed how reliant on our phones we have become. It’s not until your phone is unusable that you realise how much other stuff you do relies on being able to receive text messages with One Time Passwords and the like.

Having not backed up the photos on my phone for a couple of weeks, I’ve lost a few pictures (I posted some from the gig on Facebook on the way home, so I still have them), but I probably got away lightly, most other stuff was backed up and a couple of frustrating moments apart, getting the new phone set up was relatively painless.

Phone technology is all well and good when it works as it should, but reliance on it introduces lots of points of potential failure: For all of the convenience of smartphones, our dependence on them means that we are in danger of putting all of our eggs in one basket.