Traditions

I am very proud of being British, I love my country, I am a royalist and greatly respect the Queen, I was bought a mug for my birthday with a picture of our dear Queen on. I believe in traditions and am a great believer in the old adage 'if it isn't broken don't try and fix it'.

One of the things which I have loved about this country is imperial measurements; miles, yards, feet, inches, stones, pounds, ounces. I know some people will say these are old fashioned measurements and we should look to the future and move with the rest of the world. I have to ask the simple question, why? I do not see why I should be told what I can and cannot measure in, I do not see that measuring things in imperial measures has a detrimental effect upon our country and its economy. Just look at America, the most successful economy and the most technologically advanced country in the world, and it still uses imperial measures. It is interesting that its next door neighbour Canada, which has tried to enforce metric measures on its population has had to abandon this and still uses; pounds ounces, feet, etc.

I suppose my main problem with the metric system is being forced to use it, what other country would enforce a ridiculous law that actually makes it illegal to sell goods in imperial measures? I have nothing against the metric system, if you want to use it fell free, but I would like to be able to use it when I go to the shops and so would many millions of others. What is interesting is this drive to force us to use metric measurements has been gradual, but over recent years it has increased in speed. Chefs now only use metric measurements on TV and in their cook books, the BBC seems to be obsessed with them as you may have noticed recently when giving the depth of snow in their weather forecasts.

Some weights are still given in imperial measurements, such as babies weights, even the arch Europhile Tony Blair announced his babies weight in pounds and ounces. You might argue that it is better to have one system or another because it will confuse people, especially our children, but I learned both. My children seem to be able to cope, as when they are helping cook they speak in pounds and ounces, and if they have ever weighed themselves have spoken their weight in stones and pounds.

In 2001 market trader Steve Thorburn was prosecuted for selling his fruit and veg in pounds. He said he would sell his goods in kilos and grams if that was what his customers wanted but in all the time he was trading he said he had only one person ask for their fruit in metric. Off course this held no weight with the trading standards zealots who wasted £1000's of tax payers money taking him to court, they also forced many hundreds of thousands of businesses to replace their old scales on pain of prosecution. Sadly in 2004 at the age of 39 Steve Thorburn died of a heart attack, many thought it was brought on by the stress of fighting these jobsworths and petty bureaucrats.

You may argue that in the grand scheme of things it does not really matter, and there are more important things to worry about, and in some ways you would be right. But I believe there are some fundamental points here about freedom, does it really matter what we sell or buy our goods in? Does it really matter if I say my weight in stone, pounds and ounces? I believe not, and that is my point, over recent years we have been forced to endure change after change and most of the time it is change for changes sake. Many changes have been forced on us over recent years without any consultation and have not been for the better.

I believe strongly in freedom, and I believe I should be free to deal in imperial measurements if I want and so should anyone else. So if you believe in traditions and like them carry on using them and don't let anyone tell you you can't!