Beer Comes in Pints, Bozza...

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Nice piece in the i 'My View' comment section by Ian Dunt today, ripping one out of the news that we can now officially sell wine in pint bottles again, hooray! Trumpeted by the Minister for Enterprise as '... Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this...'. It turns out that Boris Johnson's notion that - [measuring using Imperial units is an] '... ancient liberty...' - ignores the fact that the Imperial system was only instituted in 1826 and that his subsequent review of weights and measures initiated in 2016 revealed on consultation that less than one half of one percent of those asked even wanted to return to an entirely Imperial system, and that over eighty percent of the sample were enthusiastically content to continue as we currently are with the metric system.

We could of course, as I've alluded to in blog posts past, return to the [actually ancient, Bozza!] "English System", which of course uses lines, barleycorns, poles, chains, roods, pecks, bushels, cubits, spans and ever-so-many other wonderful, if ever-so-slightly abstruse and frankly vague, if charmingly human units of measure, dating far back into antiquity. So, the desire to 'take back control' of our weights and measures is based on a return to standards dating merely back to the late Georgian era. Under Victoria's subsequent reign, the first signs of attempts to enter a new, decimal era were evident in the introduction of a new coin of the realm: the florin, or the two-bob-bit: one tenth of a pound Sterling.

Doesn't say much for Boris Johnson's excruciatingly expensive classical education, does it? It also underestimates that the rest of us in the UK have moved on and that the bulk of the world, America excepted, did so long ago, particularly in Europe. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to think in multiple measuring systems, having been educated in the crossover period of the 1960s; however to anyone under fifty, metric is the only standard they understand or need. And as for Johnson, faux tradition is his stock in trade, as with most all conservatives: their collective schtick being some 'rosy' vision of forelock-tugging peasantry and benevolent toffs. Jesus, how thick can they think we all really are? As for the 'extra' amount in a pint versus a half-litre bottle: can anyone tell me when they last bought a 500ml bottle of wine? Thought so: and frankly, I'm also sticking with the full-size seventy-five centilitre jobby, so there. Unless they bring back flagons of course...

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