When I was a small girl, Ireland converted to metric. From imperial not from catholicism, clearly. This presented no difficulties for me as my parents are both from the science side of the great divide and, from earliest youth, my father, in particular, had banned the use of feet, inches, yards, miles, pints and other such measures and insisted that we use the far more useful and comprehensible centimetres, metres, litres and so on. Mind you, our milk was still delivered in pints which presented some problems “would somebody get an approximately half litre of milk from the fridge” does not trip off the tongue. The other day, the Princess asked me what an inch was and I explained that it was the measure that they use in the UK and the US. “And what all your relatives in Ireland use” added Mr. Waffle. “Not my relatives” I said startled and told him about the strict ban on imperial measures in my parents’ house (also on hopefully in its non-adverbial form). “I see” he said thoughtfully “I had noticed that you were much more metric than me”. “Isn’t everyone in Ireland metric?” “No”. “Oh”.
