Imperial measures

One of the things I would have liked to come back from our European escapade was some of our old weights and measures.

I realise that in some way it would be wholly impractical to return to the imperial form of linear measurement, what with a generation of builders missing out on the old feet and inches. Do they still do a ‘tad more’ in metric?

I was referring more to the sale of fuel in litres, and how much we have been short-changed, if you like. The same can be said of weights, and that measly little gram.

We say that a car does so many miles to the gallon, and that not only are our road signs relative to miles per hour, the speedometer in the vehicle is calibrated in miles per hour.

I would like to see us buying fuel in gallons. It’s easy to forget that one litre is a small amount, about four and a quarter of these little babies to make a gallon.

But do we notice or even complain when the cost of one litre goes up by a few pence? Now recalculate that into a gallon with an overnight increase of say 20p and we might start to realise that a small increase in prices does matter, and we should be doing more than just moan.

The same has happened with pounds and ounces. My wife purchased a product which has been 500g forever, she says. This week the weight went down to 485g, but the price increased by five pence. Not a lot, you would hardly notice. She didn’t notice the weight until she got home.

But this has now become the norm, a few pence more for a few grams less. If we had pounds and ounces back, shoppers would soon see how we have become duped.

Supermarkets are now mastering the art of quantity reduction, and by keeping the packaging unchanged, you won’t notice until it’s too late. Brian Nevill Gosport