Metric - I feel such a fool!

You may not believe this but until I married my husband (who put me right) I always thought that vertical was flat and horizontal was upright. Not one math teacher put me right at school. I was educated at a grammer school too!! To this day I have to think carefully as it is
etched on my brain.

I have sort of refused to accept the Metric system. I know exactly where I am in inches, feet, yards etc. I cannot visualise a metre. I do know what a yard looks like (and yes, I know there isn't much difference but three yards I am fine with, three metres is a different ball game.) Same with weights.

I know my weight in stones and pounds. Kilos mean absolutely nothing to me.

Yes, I prefer working with imperial measurements but no one taught me metric (my O Level Maths qualification was pre-decimalisation) and it's a bit like a foreign language to me. I'll muddle through, but I'll never speak it fluently.

I hate the metric system too and still work in inches and lbs and oz as that is how we were taught in the 50s and 60s. But I manage to cope with most weights and measures except for distance. The meaning of kilometres escapes me completely. And I’m never sure if a mile is longer or shorter than a kilometre, ?

One of the more bizarre things I learnt as a child is that a Pint of Water weighs a pound and a quarter. I’m not sure that has ever been useful in the last 60+ years.

CaroleAnne that made me smile, but I can see how things get embedded and it's so difficult to reverse your thinking isn't it!
(So when you stood on a beach and looked into the far distance where the sea and sky met, did you call that the 'vertic'?)

I remember my mother roughly measuring a yard by holding the piece of cloth to her nose and stretching out her hand as far as she could !
I convert centigrade into farenheit by doubling the number and adding thirty e.g. 10C x 2 = 20 + 30 = 50F. It's not exactly spot on but it gives me a general idea of how warm it is.

youve taught me something new

I very recently discovered that the mile I have been struggling to get to in my swimming, I have actually achieved for months, since I always swim 1600 metres, more or less, when I was striving for 2000 metres which, I now discover, is a sea-mile, which I can’t yet manage in the hour I allow myself in the baths.

I can't understand why it has taken you all this time to measure correctly, it is nearly 50 years since we went metric on which planet have you been living?

gilld69, me too!

Don't feel foolish, MamaCaz, I have tried explaining how many different bases we had to be able to work in to do money calculations (240 pence in a pound, 20 shillings etc), weights and measures to my grandson - he was impressed!

Megan 123.Me too. When we Brexit, no more bow and scrape,YAY, and not forgetting we stood our ground over £/ euro, wonder if we will go back to our old system of weights and measures.?

Living in Europe means living with metric all the time. Luckily I have an English set of scales to weigh myself because all scales sold here are in kilos only. Just as cars only show kilometres unlike cars in the UK which show both miles and km. When driving I still mentally convert distances to miles by dividing by 8 and multiplying by 5 to see how far we have to go.

I use both oz/lbs & g/kg for recipes (my scales have a setting I can change easily) as suits my fancy/recipe.

I buy my petrol buy using 4.5L is 1 gallon, makes it easy to decide how much I'm going to need for the next 1/2/3/4 weeks. I only fill my car up when going to visit DM as it's an almost 300 mile journey & I refuse to fill up at a Motorway Service Station.

I still work in Imperial where possible & can't get my head around temp in Centigrade, my mobile shows it in Farenheit

I've just returned from church where there was a new baby with his proud parents. I asked the weight when he was born and they immediately said 7lb 6oz. They did not say his weight in kilos.

For me imperial weights and measures belonged to living in Scotland as a child, where traffic drove on the left, and you only shook hands with someone when you met them for the very first time.

Metric measurements belonged in Denmark where the traffic moves on the right and where in my childhood you shook hands every time you met someone, and curtsied as well if you were a little girl, (boys bowed) and adult men bowed as often as not, when being introduced to women. Now curtseying has gone out of fashion, and we don't shake hands very much either.

I have really enjoyed this post as I still have to double check conversions, so imagine my surprise to find that the allotment I’ve just taken over is 5 rods!
It’s huge

I see no reason why the UK had to change from the imperial system to the decimal one other than that, of course, someone else told them to! What amuses me is when I talk to younger people in imperial measures and they say they no idea what I am talking about but when I ask them how tall they are, they reply, '5ft 6" or similar!'.

I always use Google to convert.0
My mind seems unable or unwilling to take metric on board.

What i don't understand is why if you want to buy some wood it's in metric for the length but in imperial for the width. e.g. 2 metres of 2x2 (inches)...

I just cannot get the hang of metric measurements at all, much to my family's irritation. I can't seem to "picture" what 10cm looks like, whereas 4 inches is crystal clear and I know exactly what size hole to dig.
As for millilitres and millimetres.... I'm doomed.

I was just musing that I tend to think in metric then I read quizqueen's post about height - and also weight!

We always expect to hear the weight of new babies in lbs and ounces although I was told how heavy DGS was in grams.

I went into a butchers last week and asked for 500 grams of mince. The girl looked at me strangely and I realised they were still pricing everything in pounds. A lot of market traders still do likewise.
Some years ago before we went metric it me some time after living in Europe for twelve years it took me some time to realise that a pound of something was less than half a kilo.

missdeke DH found that hilarious when he went to buy some 2" x 2" - he asked for 6ft and was told it was only sold in metres!

Another here who doesn’t like metric.
I wasn’t brought up learning it and even now I often struggle to convert back and forth.

Surely it is illegal to price - and sell - things in lbs alone Bijou? Traders were prosecuted years ago for refusing to change over.
Supermarkets tend to show both prices.