My colleague at work came back from her lunch break and said "Well I
gave her a ten shilling note and all I got for the change looks like a
few farthings!" and she held them out in her hand in disgust to show
us.
The other memory was in 1972 - after the official change-over period -
my husband registered Emma's birth and came back with a certificate
with Five Shillings printed at the bottom. I told him it wasn't legal
and to take it back because she wouldn't know what shillings were when
she was old enough to know about her birth certificate! He didn't but
she doesn't.
However, Emma now has her own business making curtains and soft
furnishings and she works in both metric and imperial. She only
learned metric at school and buys fabric in metres, but a lot of her
older customers still think in yards, feet and inches and so she has to
as well.
I'm of the generation lucky enough to have learned both at school. On
one occasion in junior school we measured out a the length of a cricket
pitch (22 yards) with a real chain of that length. In science we used
metric but in cookery and needlework it was imperial whilst in
maths/geometry we used both - one or the other, not both for the same
task.
I can now work with either, though I have to think about conversions
from one to the other. In general I think metric for small
measurements, millimetres and grams, and imperial for bigger
measurements, distance in miles, my weight in stones & pounds and
height in feet & inches. I mostly cook by guessing so it's more of
what it looks like than how much it weighs!
Brenda
On 23 Jan 2009, at 08:48, Jean Nathan wrote:
The morning of the first day of metrication, I bought something in the
newsagents that cost 37p. I have the shop assistant a pound note and
she counted out my change - "1p, 2p that's 3p. 10p makes 50p" and
triumphantly "and 10s' a pound!" The last ten being a 10 shilling note
(50p).
Brenda in Allhallows, Kent
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