Open Writing

One pound fourteen shillings and eleven pennies. We used to write it as £1.14s.11d. or it could be 34/11d. There were 20 shillings in a pound and twelve pennies in a shilling. To make it more complicated, we also had halfpennies and, when some of us were very young, quarters of a penny were called farthings. Yesterday's world in Britain was a confusing place.

The pound was symbolised by an old fashioned letter L. The lower case letter s made sense for a shilling. Pennies were shown by lower case letter d. The L and the d came from ancient Roman names. Our teachers at primary school might have been ancient Romans, too — they were very old and of another world.

Some of us welcomed the eventual arrival of decimal currency. It happened in several ex-colonies. In Zambia, the main unit became the kwacha and the small unit was the ngwee. There were, and still are, 100 ngwee in a kwacha. That made things very easy for me when I arrived in Australia, where 100 cents make one dollar. But Britain had to be different.

The main unit remained a pound, and the smaller unit was mysteriously called a pee. At least, that's how people refer to the pennies which became pence. As far as we exiles could work out, the pound was still the theoretical equivalent of two dollars, not one dollar, so one pee equated more or less with two cents or two ngwee. You see it on the financial report on telly every night, where the Australian dollar is worth something like 70 to 75 USA cents but only 40 to 42 British pee.
So far, so good. We've come a long way from twopence-halfpenny bus fares, fourpence-halfpenny loaves of bread, 1/9d. for a haircut, and 34/11d. for the original Biro ballpoint pen. But a new confusion is now among us.

In Australia, metric measurements were introduced about thirty years ago. It was to be a clean change. School suppliers were instructed — not merely advised — that no more 12-inch rulers could be sold, and nor could rulers show both inches and centimetres. No help with conversion. It was to be millimetres and centimetres, full stop. For longer measurements we changed from miles to kilometres.
'Weight' became 'mass'. Pounds and ounces became kilograms and grams. Tons became tonnes, which some of us are still trying to work out. Along the way, temperatures changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius and strange new units appeared on our barometers, something to do with Hector's pastels... no, it might be hectopascals. But I digress.

Nevertheless, a foreign chain of fast-food cafés started selling 'quarter pounder' hamburgers. In the old-fashioned system, that implied a weight of four ounces. In the new system, which the Government had instructed us to use, it means a little over 113 grams. Another foreign fast-food chain sells 'footlong' meat and salad rolls. It might be 'foot long' or 'foot-long'. Anyway, it means 30.48 centimetres.

We live in a world where decimalised and metricated kids speak freely of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes. They probably have no concept of the 6/3½d. I used to pay for Golden Platignum fountain pens in my schooldays. They pass their golden days spending 100 cents in a dollar, knowing their weight in kilograms, and measuring their height in centimetres. On the other hand, they are expected to understand quarter-pounders and footlongs.

Ho hum. Perhaps commercial corporations really are much more powerful than mere national governments. But is that the sort of tomorrow's world we really want for our kids?

© Copyright Brian Barratt 2007