Tipping Over to the Dutch Side (2) - Yards and Meters

That'll be 3/4 miles, not kilometres...
(c) Amanda van Mulligen

My last post was about the little things I noticed during a recent trip to England that may mean I have started tipping over to the Dutch side. My Britishness is diminishing a little. Here's another example.

Sitting in my dad's car on the way to his house from Southampton airport he had the sat nav system on. A female voice was telling him about things that he should be doing in a few hundred yards. She may as well have been talking gobbledygook. Yards? I had no idea how long we would need to drive to get a few hundred yards further.

I realised I've gone completely metric. Metres I know. Centimetres I get. Yards means nothing to me any more. A foot is vaguely familiar but not a measurement I think in. Inches I fondly remember. But meters and centimetres are my friends.

Officially the UK has gone partially metric but signposts must display distances in miles and yards and not kilometres or metres. Length and width restrictions on roadsigns are in feet and inches and weight is generally still thought of as stones and pounds rather than the kilograms used in Europe.

It's taken a while to stop thinking of myself as five foot something and remember that I am 166 cm high. However, I'm now there and I recently discovered that tipping over to the Dutch side means that yards, feet and inches are now a part of my history.