IT IS, of course, hugely ironic that Britain's pounds, inches and pints have only been spared from Napoleon's revenge of metrication at the dictate of the Eurocrats thanks to the Yanks.

So, because America has failed to adopt European standards - and why the heck should it? - and insists on goods from EU countries coming in good old imperial measures, the interfering Brussels bunch has given what's left of our traditional measures a reprieve for ten years.

But while the reprieve may be welcome to some extent, what the country really wants is a blanket ban on these European grammes, litres and kilometres that no-one here either wants or understands. Most people already need a calculator to make sense of the weather forecast with its darned Celsius temperatures and Fahrenheit getting a mention nowadays as often as a blue moon.

Where the heck has democracy gone in our membership of the EU? The fact is that most people in this country - even kids taught in metric at school: they don't refer to 6ft-tall people as being 1.83 metres, do they? - think and calculate in imperial measures. Yet, increasingly, they are denied them.

But while it's fine that America tells the bossy EU to take a running jump in yards, would there not be tons, not tonnes, of delight if our government did the same?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.