Sir – Iris Ramkissoon takes issue with the heights of buildings in Oxford being described in metres (Metric nonsense, Letters, February 11), and asks if England has been transported to the Continent.

But the metric system is not Continental – it’s global, and is so much more logical and appropriate for today’s world than a system cobbled together with a hotchpotch of measures based on the length of a barleycorn, the distance a horse would pull a plough before turning or the length of some long-forgotten king’s arm.

I’ve used metric units since I was taught them in the 1950s, when it was always such a bother trying to remember whether there were 1,760 yards in a mile and 2,240 pounds in a ton or the other way around.

When it came to woodwork, which was bigger, one and three-eighths or fifteen sixteenths”? So much easier to compare 35mm and 33mm. I also remember wrestling with percentages of pounds, shillings and pence; I’m sure very few people would want to go back to pre-decimal coinage.

Mrs Ramkissoon points out that the Americans still use Imperial units, but that produces further problems: US pints and gallons are 20% smaller than their British counterparts, and a person’s weight in the USA is stated in pounds, which we find hard to grasp, while American can’t fathom stones.

While Imperial terms will doubtless live on in the language, for practical purposes metric is the more useful and sensible system, being the common language of astronauts, builders, chemists, doctors – virtually all professions, in fact. As I see it, if God had intended us to be metric, he’d have given us ten fingers!

Rick Taylor
Eynsham