I have been away for the last two days as I made a mini cruise to Newcastle on a large cruise ferry from DFDS, a Danish shipping company that operates a service between IJmuiden (at the harbour's mouth of Amsterdam) and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Amsterdam is about 25 km inland and ships have to go through a system of locks. DFDS's IJmuiden terminal is west of the locks and close to the sea. Obviously that is to their advantage. The crossing takes 15 hours. The buses that brought people from the terminal in Tynemouth to Newcastle and back were new, but a sign above to driver told us the height of the bus: 14' 6''. In ifp's clutches once again! I saw several metric or metric/imperial signs (land for sale (16 ha/40 acres), private max.height indications, etc: all to be sorted out by ARM, of course! Britain today cannot yet be regarded as a metric country, but she is a metrological battlefield anyway. Too bad I did not have enough time to go to Sunderland and buy a bunch of bananas from a certain greengrocer. Sunderland is not too far from Newcastle. Imagine, crossing the North Sea from The Netherlands just to buy a bunch of bananas in Britain!
There was music on the ship and one of the songs I heard was from the film "The Titanic"! Han Historian of Dutch Metrication, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
