Of Rood Intelligence

So - Doris, in his frantic scramble towards the light of his rapidly diminishing popularity, wants a return to Imperial weights and measures, amongst a raft of other spurious distractions from his travails. Just who he's actually aiming this deckchair shuffling at is unclear: I'm old enough that I can easily work in either system, moving from metric to the old stuff at will, depending on what I'm working on at the time. I even mix inches and millimetres on the same project, more or less at random. While I was still a telecoms engineer, though, I worked exclusively in metric, as everything we did or used was metric, down to measuring cable runs in kilometres rather than miles.

Anyone under forty, though, won't have much of a clue as to what a quarter of sliced ham, for instance, might actually weigh. To be precise, it's four ounces - a quarter of a pound - or 113.398 grams. I admit that at larger, human scales, such as this example, I prefer the old measures, as they clump together nicely into manageable numbers and fractions of those numbers; but I guess it's also because we were the first generation of schoolkids to be taught both systems, in parallel, at Junior School: a prelude to the UK's entry into what became the EU, planned and negotiated for a couple of decades before it actually happened.

Even I restrict my use of old-school measures largely to feet and inches and pounds and ounces. But what of rods, poles and perches? Actually, they're all synonyms for the same measure and are equivalent to thirty-and-a-quarter square yards; forty of them equalling a rood, or quarter of an acre. I do hope I'm being clear. Just how far back into the arcane depths of all of this the tousled oaf wants to take us is unclear, but one thing is for sure: an awful lot of the voting public won't have a clue what it's all about anyway, let alone care. But then Doris is not exactly well known for being in touch with the rest of us, is he?

Pictured above: the sign included in Pieter Aertsen's painting A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms reads in Flemish: "behind here are 154 rods of land for sale immediately, either by the rod according to your convenience or all at once". [source Wikiwand]