“What’s that in pounds?”

If I’ve heard that once I’ve heard it a thousand times.

For many years, until its closure in 2019, I had the pleasure of working part-time in a fruit and vegetable shop, and not a day went by without someone asking me to translate grams and kilograms into pounds and ounces.

When I started there I didn’t know a gram from a kilogram, or a millilitre from a litre and, it seemed, I wasn’t alone.

Like many people aged 60-plus, I was raised on pounds and ounces, pints and gallons. I knew sugar came in 2lb bags, as did flour. Our cookbooks used those measurements, so did the cookery teacher at school.

My mum’s weighing scales, used daily throughout her life, are in pounds and ounces, as are my own kitchen scales with their little brass weights.

It was only when I started at the veg shop that I learned what a kilogram of something actually looked like. For hours I would fill 1kg, 2kg and 5kg bags of carrots, potatoes and onions and heave 20kg sacks of spuds to customers’ cars. Some fruit, such as blueberries, were weighed in grams, so I picked up a little knowledge about those too.

Despite my later-in-life grasp of some metric weights, I would welcome the reappearance of imperial measurements in our shops.

Since the mid-1990s, in what felt like a law from the dark ages, shopkeepers have faced fines for displaying signs in pounds and ounces rather than grams and kilograms. Now, post-Brexit, Boris Johnson has pledged to legislate to allow British traders to once again sell their wares in pounds and ounces.

It’s something to be celebrated. Maybe it’s a case of young minds being better-able to absorb and retain information, but the imperial system I was taught and used as a child has firmly stuck.

I still use feet and inches. If someone asked me to mark out three feet I’d make a pretty decent stab at it, largely based on my memory of the 3ft end of the pool at Guisborough Swimming Baths, but asked to indicate three metres, I’d struggle.

My husband goes mad. Just a year younger than me, he has only ever been taught metric and finds my ignorance infuriating.

From my experience at the shop, it’s not uncommon to be stuck in an imperial world. In marmalade-making season, just about every customer would come in with their Seville orange requirements in imperial measurements, then get flustered trying to covert them.

Thankfully, for those of us with imperial scales, many cookbooks give both imperial and metric measurements, indicating that both are still widely used.

Some may say people like me are stuck in the past. They are probably right. We didn’t want to learn a new system and so, mentally, we haven’t.

Some people haven’t moved on from old money. I often hear people refer to something costing ‘ten bob’ or ‘two shillings’.

We still weigh ourselves in stone and you don’t hear people in pubs asking for ‘0.568261 of bitter’, equivalent to a pint.

Thankfully, this country didn’t go one step further, abandoning miles in favour of kilometres, changing every road sign in the process. Had that happened many of us metric-averse oldies would have found ourselves setting off three hours earlier, believing we had further to travel.

But live and let live, I say. While we are known for being a nation of monoglots, with weights and measures we will hopefully be able to operate both metric and imperial side-by-side, without any angst.

Hopefully.