THOSE of us who admit to belonging to the Third Age can remember only too clearly the introduction of decimal currency. We were able to cope with it because we were still young enough to be able to get our brains round these funny coins which became knows as Ps rather than pence or pennies. You had a two penny piece which was roughly worth six old pence (strictly speaking it was two and a half pence) a two shilling piece which was only ten pence worth in the new currency, and so on.

Everyone felt they had been robbed when the new currency was geared to the pound instead of the ten shilling note, but the older you were the more difficult it was to do the conversions

in your head when you were

shopping.

Some shops refused to trade in decimal prices because of the cost of converting tills and a number actually closed down rather than grapple with the new currency. Slowly it became a way of life that we all accepted and we stopped converting back to 'old money' as we added up our new and expensive grocery.

Now we are the older generation and are facing the new nightmare of having to buy everything in decimal weights and measures and once again the shopkeepers are faced with conversion costs for scales and tills. It is now illegal to offer for sale items priced or weighed in Imperial measures. A pound of potatoes is now 0.453kg and a pint of milk is 0.568 litres. No one is going to remember those kinds of figures and there is one thing you can be sure of - any rounding of weights or costs will inevitably be up and not down.

Of course you will be able to pick up your fruit and veg by numbers and let it be weighed but you will still have to work out the price in kilograms to see if you have paid roughly what you expected to pay or whether the housekeeping money has been mugged.

The other big problem which I have already encountered is the fact that most houses, except possibly very new ones, tend to be made to Imperial measurements, so when you go to buy a new carpet or new curtains nothing is quite the right size. Net curtains are always either just a fraction too long or about an inch too short (or should I say 2.54cm).

If you have fitted bedroom furniture from the old days and want to buy a new bed you may find that it is difficult to find one that fits the existing space without leaving a crack each side down which everything disappears but which is not wide enough to allow your questing hand to retrieve the lost items. I speak from experience and have the bruises to prove it!

America has managed perfectly well in allowing both metric and Imperial measures to exist side by side so that all corners can be satisfied. Here our shopkeepers face a £2,000 fine or prison if they do not comply. It will once again be the small shops which suffer under this ruling and we shall not gain one whit of benefit as once again Brussels calls the tune for us to dance to.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.