After all, diversity has always been part of England's undisputed charm: driving on the left, the pound kept and defended while everyone else yielded to the Euro, up to the more banal daily ritual of tea instead of coffee. And now Brexit has granted Boris Johnson's government a major restoration: the farewell to the metric system imposed by the European Union two decades ago, and the return to imperial measures, that is pounds (pounds) and ounces (ounces) . In the markets, fruit and vegetables will no longer weigh in kilos or hectograms, to which so many old-guard shopkeepers were reluctantly accustomed. We will return to the past, which in these parts no one has ever forgotten, also because it has never really been abandoned.
The imperial system in recent decades has run parallel to the decimal method. Introduced by the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, it was used throughout the British Empire until the late 19th century. And the United Kingdom continued to use it despite European regulations thanks to an ad hoc exception for the subjects of Queen Elizabeth: the goods could report, alongside the decimal measures, also those of the imperial system.
The restoration of imperial measures is a promise made by Boris Johnson in the days of his settlement in Downing Street, and some also see it as a posthumous victory for Steve Thoburn, the greengrocer who went down in history as "the martyr of metrics", who was condemned to six months in prison for selling a bunch of bananas in pounds instead of grams. Johnson, who at the time was editor of the Spectator, the conservative weekly, had spoken out against the "monstrosity" of "forcing the British to use Napoleon's measures." Now the revenge has come.
In road distances, the metric system had never made its way into Anglo-Saxon culture. The length of the roads has always been expressed in miles (one mile: 1,609 meters) and not in kilometers. A mutual impermeability: in most of Europe and certainly in Italy almost everyone has to resort to tables - now Google is helping - to convert inches (25.4 millimeters) and feet (304.8 millimeters). But in the imperial system, when it comes to length, there are also the hand (101.6 mm), the span (228.6 mm), the elbow or cubit (457.2 mm), then the yard or yard (the equivalent of three feet, 914 millimeters), the arm (two yards), the bar (5 meters) the chain (20 meters) the furlong (201 meters). And what about the system for measuring mass: the fixed points are the ounce (28.3 grams) and the pound, equal to 16 ounces (453 grams). Before and after there are the wheat (1/7000 of a pound, or 64 mg), the drama (one eighth of an ounce), the stone (14 pounds), the quarter (2 stones), the hundredweight (4 quarters, about 51 chili) and the long ton, about one ton.
And the royal crown emblem on beer mugs will also return to English pubs, a system introduced in 1699 to establish how far a glass must be filled to get to a pint (in 2006 it was replaced by the less poetic CE mark of European conformity) . The pint is used to measure the capacity, and corresponds to 568 ml. Of course, when it comes to beer, the pint is used in the rest of the world and also in Italy, where glasses are usually filled up to 400ml. The classic “zeroquaranta” has always been called improperly - at this point it must be said - pint, when in reality there were 168 milliliters missing to be so.