Metric Britain

One of the best things about the slow return to normality l is that I can once again have food cooked for me by a professional, and eat it in a restaurant.  I will confess that I do not enjoy cooking. However, I prefer this form of suffering to the misery of a substandard and lukewarm meal delivered to my front door an hour late by someone who probably fell off their bike or moped en route.  When I do cook, I tend not to follow recipes. I put things that I think go together and it usually turns out somewhere between passable and good.  Back when the UK was switching to metric units in the 60s and 70s, one of the common arguments against transition was that cooking in metric would be "strange, and make things taste different". Unsurprisingly, this argument does not hold, because cooking is about proportions. It therefore follows that it does not matter whether recipes use metric or imperial - as long as the proportions are the same.  Although this blog favours the use...

The beauty and fundamental benefit of the metric system is its ease of use, which is largely due to it being decimal. Within the system, it is simple to compare the measurements of objects. For example, it takes very little effort to convert or compare a centimetre to a kilometre – much less than comparing an inch to a furlong. For the most part, metric measures are based on an SI base unit, with sub units which are either a multiple or a fraction of ten of that SI unit. A simple example of this is the metre. It is the SI unit for length. A millimetre is 1/1000 of a metre and a kilometre being 1000 metres. However there are some exceptions. With mass, the kilogram is the SI unit, rather than the gram, but still, all measurements of mass are still based on ten around the gram. I am sure none of this is new, but I will get to the point eventually. The SI unit for time is the second. It is common for SI prefixes to be used for times shorter than a second (millisecond, nanosecond, ...

Lockdown has gifted us the luxury of time. Time to bake sourdough bread. Time to learn a language. Time to shed a few kg. Time to learn an instrument. Time time to read. More realistically, time to watch Netflix. In fact, this luxury of time reminds me of Ecclesiastes Ch.3. Anyone who has been to a church wedding or funeral would have heard it. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh;... I will spare you the rest.   As someone who is often too busy "doing things" rather than thinking about them, the inability to partake in my usual social activities has left me with ample time to think. Time to think about self-improvement. Time to think about the things that really matter. Time to think about the people who really matte...

I have not had a single alcoholic drink since New Year's Eve. Given the lockdown, I have little incentive to drink, and so have inadvertently done Dry January. I am halfway through February sober and with Lent fast approaching, may well not be seeing booze until Easter. (The key word here is may. This restrained life is going out the window as soon as we are allowed to socialise meaningfully again.) Unlike the non-drinkers, I will not get on a high horse and preach about the virtues of sobriety. Find your nearest convert to the Church of Tee-Totalism and they will no doubt tell you that quitting booze makes you more energetic, sleep better and think more sharply. Whether there's truth to that is a matter for science. However, I have noticed myself thinking more sharply about one thing in particular - getting my hands on a freshly poured pint of anything amber (except cider... or petrol). In my first post of the current era of this blog, "showing a bit of kindness to the im...

This is one of the "few other things" I mention in the strapline of the blog.  The last clash of the titans was in 1962. I was not alive then, but at some point in the late 90s/early noughties when I was around ten years old and absolutely crazy about Godzilla and the MonsterVerse, I saw in the TV guide that King Kong vs Godzilla was showing. I defied my parents and stayed up until 2 am to watch the film. I was excited. I had seen Godzilla emerge triumphant from battles with numerous other beasts. At this point, however I had not seen any King Kong films, but my brother had constantly told me that King Kong would be Godzilla's ultimate rival. I was eager to see this battle. By the end of the film, the excitement was replaced with anger and disappointment.  My idol was defeated by the oversized ape. I've detested King Kong ever since.  Fast forward two decades and the two titans are set to meet again, this time as CGI monsters and not men in rubber get-ups. If the pand...

I detest running. It is the most soul-crushingly monotonous recreational activity that mankind has inflicted upon itself. However with lockdowns, advancing age, limited exercise options and a fervent desire to not get a belly, it has become a necessary evil.  I now look forward to going for a run. This is temporary. But even in on a cold, grey day, it's an opportunity to absorb some daylight, catch up on a podcast and maybe even smile at another human being.   Despite going running almost every other day now, I don't cover huge distances. I average 5 to 10 km. People often seem quite impressed by that. I don't know why.  What does impress me is that whenever I'm asked how far I've run and I give an answer in kilometres, nobody asks me, "What's that in miles?"  People seem to simply understand.  The same universal understanding is not true when I use kilometres for anything else. For example, when giving someone directions. A significant proportion of p...