ANTHONY Reeve has clearly picked up tips from the current White House.

Decimalisation was not a result of joining or intending to join the Common Market.  It had been on off the agenda since the 1760s and was as a result of the fall in the value of the currency if anything else. 

The elderly were not confused by the change, I worked in a shop and they knew exactly how it worked. 

If anything it was people in their 30 or 40s who had problems.

While we are obliged to display and package in metric – picked up from directives – the obligation to stop using imperial measures as secondary measurements has been removed. 

Frankly I find using metric measurements instead of thous of an inch, chains, rods and perches a bit easier. 

Anyway, we still have miles per hour, pints of milk and all the other imperial niceties.  Who made us give fractions?

The new road signs were introduced in 1965 and different European countrie have some unique signs of their own.

The government considered changing the road priorities in the 1960s but it was deemed too expensive as many junctions would need to be redesigned.  That was pre-Common Market.

Celsius was adopted in 1965, just a bit easier to do temperature.  Certainly easier when doing science at school without taking away 32 and dividing by 5/9.

BST, that traditional old standard was ntroduced during World War One and changed during World War Two. 

Harold Wilson’s government did the experiment from 1968-1971.  Oops, not Heath and before the EU.

Clean beaches directed by the EU.  Outrageous, why shouldn’t we be able to wallow in our own ordure, we don’t need the clean water and beaches directives. 

The fact is there were too many vested interests at play for us to have done anything about it, and we hadn’t for many years. 

That directive also cleaned up the beaches we holiday on in Europe too, so it was not just an anti-British thing.

The act that covered the Soham murders was the Data Protection Act 1984 and that it was too imprecise, vested interests again, it was repealed by the 1998 act (EU directive from 1995) and business was opposed it because they said it was prescriptive. 

It has now been repealed and a new 2018 act brought in to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is stronger still and hated by all those companies that want to sell your data.

 The EU has its faults and needs reforming, we are giving up that chance just when other nations are lining up to demand reform. 

But please don’t perpetuate the myths dredged from some alt-right universe version of history, a feet and inches universe where urchins touch their caps as you drop a farthing in their tin.

Your obedient servant.

– Ian Coghlan, via e-mail.