Doing the numbers

Having plenty of time on my hands during this morning's voyage of discovery that was the morning commute, I finished the crosswords in both the newspapers on the way in to work (I had to pick up a book to read on the way back).

Doing one of the crosswords it occurred to me that I'm probably going to be of the last generation that would understand the significance of a rod, pole or perch. When I was a tiny tot we all had little red exercise books which had a couple of hundred little boxes on the back cover, each one containing a table of relationships between different suites of avoirdupois and sundry other Imperial measurement units, starting with the nursery slopes:

16 drachms = 1 ounce
16 oz. = 1 pound
14 lb = 1 stone
8 st. = 1 hundredweight
20 cwt. = 1 ton

and then moving right along to scruples, firkins, ells, rods, poles, perches, pennyweights and fathoms. Heady stuff.

I reckon that the move to metrication has made it more difficult for the children of today to get to grips with mathematics away from the calculator, till and spreadsheet. If everything's in base ten then there's no opportunity to practice simple calculations in everyday life. So it becomes trickier to make sure you're getting the right change when you're down the shops doing your messages.

And we miss out on the sheer versaitilty of base twelve. Ah well...