Supposedly it is drier in your general area than the average for the country, isn't it, Paul?
Yes -- We're supposed to have less than half the national average rainfall here, and with a weakly developed summer maximum
I still can't quite believe that fuss in 1976,
Ah, summer '76. Tall ice-cream sodas every day after school. camping in the tent in the back garden every night, and seeing standpipes set up on streetcorners on the news.
Are they metering UK water yet, or is it still on the old flat-rate tariff?
It's a mixture. New homes are going straight on to meters, but older properties are still on flat rate (myself included). In this area at least, you can switch to metered service but have the option of reverting to unmetered within the first year if you wish.
After a year, or when a property changes ownership, the meter has to stay though. The rates for my area are here:
http://www.anglianwater.co.uk/index.php?sectionid=35&parentid=14 It is a mystery to me how anybody of my age (b 1968) will never have been taught anything but metric, and yet when I left the country about 10 years ago, they were all arguing about bananas by the ounce, led on by a man who appointed himself the "metric martyr", older than me by only a couple of years.
Our decaying state education system may have switched to teaching only metric in the 1970s, but Brits of our generation still learned Imperial measurements from friends and family, private schools, etc. (I was born 1966).
Go up to a hundred people in the typical British town and ask how much they weigh or how tall they are. How many do you think will answer in kilograms and meters?
I'd say that the rebellion now is not so much about which system is better, or easier, but more with the way the government is dictating what people use and trying to impose draconian penalties on those who refuse to comply.
Unless something is done to change the proposed law, after 2010 it will become illegal to even display an Imperial equivalent alongside the metric on packaging and signs.
tell them to picture one pint of water, and then ask them to tell you how many cubic inches that represents.
1 Imp. pt. = 34.68 cu. in.
1 U.S. pt = 28.88 cu. in. (wet), 33.6 cu. in. (dry).
As Alan pointed out though, how often does one need to make such a conversion in everyday usage? Pints to gallons and pints to fluid ounces covers most everyday conversions, and they're easy. Same with inches, feet, and yards, or pounds and ounces. The Imperial and U.S. Customary systems grew up around units which represented everyday quantities, and that's why they're liked.
Even metric France still retains the
pousse and the
livre, albeit that the latter is not the same as an English pound.