A Pennyweight of Common Sense, Please...

Brexiteer nationalist tub-thumping continues apace with the news - i, Friday 17th September - that traders will once again be allowed to sell products by the pound (and ounce), in a move to 'reverse' heinous EU ideas and legislation now that we have left the Union, allowing us to regain sovereignty over our weights and measures: even giving us the Crown mark back on our beer glasses, despite successive governments' attempts to tax the pub industry into the grave anyway.

Lord Frost, BoJo's Brexit chief is crowing that '...Brexit freedoms are [used] to help businesses and citizens get on and succeed...' Quite how a return to a non-base-ten counting system will achieve this is not actually explained. I will admit that I still have a fondness for our former duodecimal monetary system, phased out in 1971 to be replaced with the current decimal one. But I'm a member of the last generation to have been brought up with it and to have used it. Anyone born after about 1968 would not have a clue when faced with Pounds, Shillings and Pence, and yet surely, the logical end to a return to Imperial measures surely would militate towards reintroducing the old money, just for completeness' sake?

Or is it only to be weights? Can't really lump in measures as we've never really left the Old World with a lot of 'em: we still drive miles and drink pints, after all. Even in the weights department, old-school systems like Troy have never gone away in the bullion and jewellery worlds. Are we to abandon completely the scientific world's (wholly) metric system - which for a lot of us sits happily alongside inches, feet, yards and miles; with chains and furlongs in the background still (cricket and horse-racing using both respectively, around the world): and dive head-first into the bizarre medievalism of rods, poles and perches? What about bushels, pecks, quarts and the sundry other measures that my generation grew up with? What on earth would anyone under sixty-five make of any of it? It beggars belief that Farage's fantasy island is still being touted as the New Jerusalem, builded here in the twenty-first century.

The core of this fantasy is that the EU foisted it all onto us in the first place. It didn't. Period. Britain joined the EU in 1972, a year after we finally decimalised our currency, a process that started some time before in 1682. Yes - 1682: Europe didn't actually exist in the modern sense of the word, let alone as a cohesive, formal economic and political unit. The first practical attempt to move towards metrication came with the introduction of the British florin to our currency in 1849: two shillings or one tenth of a pound. In reality that's as far as it went until decimalisation in 1971, with 240 pence to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling - hence 20 shillings to the pound: everything counted in twos, threes, sixes, twelves and twenties. Simple. If you were brought up with it - just like the weights they seem so enamoured with, these Faragists: 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone, 2 stones to the quarter (as opposed to the quarter of a pound: four ounces), four quarters to the hundredweight and twenty hundredweights to the ton (UK Imperial - US measures diverge).

My point is a) this was never a European issue in the first place and b) when you start down this rabid nationalist rabbit-hole, where do you stop? Why not go back to using cubits and spans, for instance? Lord Frost wasn't born until 1965, six years before decimalisation and seven before our entry into the (then) EEC. By that time, I had been taught both imperial and decimal systems in parallel - including the twenty-four-hour clock (still a universally-accepted duodecimal system in itself) - at junior school from the age of seven or eight; a good half-decade before his birth. Boris Johnson emerged in 1964 as did Nigel Farage: both born into an already partly metric Britain. I rest my case: grow up, you lot. And by the way, if you actually supped that obviously over-chilled ullage you're holding aloft, Nige, you ain't much of a connoisseur of real ale, however it's measured.

Addendum - Of course, I'm missing the point that none of these idiots actually *do* anything of any import in this world: they're solely about making themselves famous and more wealthy than they already are. The real world is immeasurably different (pun intended). For some measured (sorry) input, check out this BBC documentary.