Hold your horses for a wild ride

I WAS wandering along the canal towpath at the weekend, in glorious sunshine.

It was before we apparently angered the weather gods, who in their questionable wisdom have decided that sub-arctic temperatures and sleet in the middle of April is what we all need after the bleakest of winters.

I was already well aware I’ve spent far too long inside this last year, with excess time for leftfield ponderings.

But if that hadn’t been clear before the walk, I would have worked it out after a few hundred yards.

Or a couple of furlongs, if you prefer.

Alongside the traditional Rosie-and-jim-style barges are the more modern boats.

They’re generally less quaint to look at but I’d still rather have travelled around in one of those for a year of lockdown than stare at the walls of my living room.

Rather than the big old diesel engines softly chugging away deep in the belly of the boat, they tend to have a small outboard engine, measured – in this day and age – in horses.

The number on the back – that’s horse power. So literally, an engine with a 10 painted on the side means it can move that boat with the power of 10 horses.

It’s one of those things that we take as read now, as though that’s a completely obvious way to measure engine power, but if you ask me it’s just plain weird.

I mean, when did someone last use a horse to drag a boat?

This year humans landed a spacecraft on Mars, complete with its own helicopter, and yet here we are on Earth still measuring things in horse power.

That’s not all. The horses themselves – if they were actually real – would be measured in hands.

That’s not the length or span of an actual hand, obviously. Instead it’s four inches, which is not the size of any adult’s hand.

But in a way, I quite like the weird old measurements, utterly ludicrous though they are. I’ve no idea how far a nautical league is, or a fathom, or how much a hundredweight weighs (although I’m going to guess it’s not a hundred of anything).

These archaic but everyday terms are a sort of living link to our past, when splendid old chaps with moustaches and mutton chops just wandered around making things up and saying “Yup, that’s how we do things now”.

For the record, I just Googled a hundred weight.

It’s 112 pounds.

If that number wasn’t happened upon by a gregarious old man with fulsome facial hair then I’ll eat my hand.

All four inches of it.