January 1st, 2000 has heralded another great change and this time you can certainly blame the EU. It's got nothing to do with straight bananas, the Euro or even the French and German Beef ban.

January 1st, 2000 sounded the death knell of the entire British Imperial measurement system.

You will still be able to ask for a pound of beef but the butcher must price it in grams and kilograms. The only exceptions will be for pints of milk and beer, the troy ounce for precious metals and miles for road signs.

The EU is now insisting that the state of co-existence between the two systems that has worked since 1897 must, in ten years time, come to an end.

Unsurprisingly, shop keepers and traders are unhappy about the new regulations. A garage owner in Exmoor whose petrol pumps can only measure in gallons has been forced to either pay £10,000 to convert his pumps or go out of business.

He has tried appealing to the Trading Standards Institute, but it seems there is not even twenty-eight point three five grams of compassion from the EU.

Very soon the pound and the ton, the ounce and the pint will go the way of the perch (five and a half yards) and the peck (eight quarts of dry goods), the firkin (eight or nine gallons) and the furlong (eighth of a mile or one furrow long): measurements much beloved of the exercise books when I was at school.

But then, when I was at school we still had pounds, shillings and pence.

No longer will we be able to run a mile, shed a couple of pounds on a slimming diet or even be buried six foot under the sod.

And, does this spell the end of the ten-gallon hat, will the inch-worm soon become extinct (a victim of the millipede?) and will we have to say 'my word, this shopping weighs one thousand one hundred and sixteen kilograms'?

We shall have no point nine-one metre-sticks by which we can measure the behaviour of our politicians. How shall we be able to fathom the depths of our beloved Prime Minister? Will Shylock get his four hundred and fifty-three grams of flesh.

What next? There remain many measurements that are not based on ten. Are there plans for a ten day week, the hundred minute hour or the twenty month year? Who knows?

Perhaps, when this century comes to an end the god of ten and its children will be omnipotent. Apart from anything else our language is destined to become poorer. I cannot imagine the gram and the kilogram eliciting the same figurative sayings.

Maybe, in a hundred years, future academicians and lexicographers will amuse their audience with anecdotes of quaint early twenty-first century speech: the funny little rhymes we used to remember mathematical facts.

Our children will wonder how we managed all that complicated working out: a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter.

What's that in proper money?

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.