Bill Harvey: Victoria was my queen

Imperial measures have never meant a firkin amount of sense to me (a firkin is half a kilderkin, or approximately 41 litres in normal language).

I was born in 1965, so was educated, thankfully, to use metric. Though road journeys in miles are familiar, I could not tell you how many feet (a unit based on the standard size of everyone’s foot) there are in a mile, but have learned there are 12 inches in a foot (a unit based on everyone’s thumb width, a well-known standard measure), so can just about convert centimetres to inches when asked to explain a working distance to an elderly patient struggling with centimetres.