April Fools was 3 days ago.

But I'll definitely sleep safer in my bed if the media revert to ton.

Good job we're not in the middle of a heavy recession and facing threats to public services or anything like that, so M.P.s have time to move onto such issues.

.....it's a highly pedantic and quite frankly useless point to be making.

Has it got to the point where gibberish like this is about as independent of Conservative policy that the Lib Dem's are allowed to get?

in the UK. I lived through the switch in Australia in the early-mid 70s and it went very well. All political parties were in favour and there was an extended campaign before, during and after so that Australians were well aware of the new units before they came into practice. We had the odd holdout, but not many and they were regarded with humour, not as heroes. We still use a few imperial units informally. For example, we say "He's a big bloke. He's 6 foot 4!" and horse race commentators still call "Swamp Rat hits the lead with two furlongs to go" (I used to know what a furlong was). And initially it was strange to hear football commentators say "Oh, he's missed by centimetres" instead of "Oh, he's missed by inches".

(Of course, we also use the old units in idiomatic speech - "do the hard yards", "don't give an inch", "a miss is as good as a mile". Probably mean nothing to young Australians. But then, "raining cats and dogs" isn't meant to be interpreted literally).

But the British conversion seems to have less strong backing. And important areas (speed signs) are still in imperial. There doesn't seem to be the lead from any party to fully metricise. And why wasn't it all done at once?

Not being a resident in the UK (born there, frequent visitor), I may be talking out of my metricated ****hole.

But I do hope they keep the pint. That should be a National Treasure.

We're now in the position of using an odd mixture of the two systems, we measure distance in miles but the petrol we use in litres...

I was raised using exclusively metric at school (schooled in the '80s and '90s), and it certainly made more sense for science subjects at A Level, but in 'real world' use such as cooking the old measures seem to make more sense to me. In shops they're obliged to use metric measures, but that doesn't stop jars weighing 454g with 1lb printed next to it; and when I ask for a piece of meat weighing 4lb (for example) the person behind the counter is generally trained to give a conversion.

that showed that schoolchildren tended to carry out exact measurements in metric units, but to estimate using the older units. Presumably because they used the metric units in school maths lessons, and the older units in more informal situations at home with their parents. I wonder if it would be different now that many of the children in the study would be parents themselves. I suspect not very different.

I was also schooled exclusively metric in 80's and 90's, and I use metric weights and measurements very heavily in my work. To be honest I find it more accurate, easier and more logical then imperial.

When it come to weight I must also admit that kilograms are quite easy to gauge as 1 kilo is the weight of one bag of sugar so you pick an item up and you think how many bags of sugar weight the same and yove got a pretty decent estimate. I even prefer metric weights for cooking as opposed to pound and ounces.

Imperial has it's uses (and I'm not in favour of government compelling people to go metric) but to be brutally honest metric is far far superior.

If they knew they'd probably be unemployed after 2015.

where did they get Mr Hemming?

... "Sits in the middle of the road doing buggerall."

(With the added truth that the only time they move anywhere is up & down when
someone drives over them.)