<$BlogRSDURL$>

Friday, January 26, 2007

Hot hot hot 

One of the nice things about South Africa is that it’s a metric country. What this means for a relocated Pom is that I live in blissful ignorance of some of the important issues of daily life. For example, I find from the scales in the gym that I weigh about 96kg. Sounds good to me. Then I converted it, and discover that I am over 15 stone, which came as a bit of a shock. I’m not a complete fat bastard – I am 1.91m tall, after all, but 96kg was OK before it was 15 stone plus.

I have the same problem with temperature. Yesterday was bloody hot, and then this morning some mist had come in and it was lovely and cool. Lovely and cool, according to the thermometer on my desk, equates to 26 Celsius. That sounds OK, until you fish out the converter and find that 26 is 79 Fahrenheit. That used to be hot when I was in London – the kind of temperature that merited newspaper comments and columns offering advice like “wear loose clothing” and “drink cold stuff”. After yesterday it’s blissful. Yesterday was about 38 / 100, and still too, so that cupboards opened this morning dealt a waft of hot air trapped there overnight.

The final metric confusion is the tricky one, as yet untested. How do I persuade a traffic cop that I thought the speed limits were in miles per hour…?

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?