I'm so glad you clarified this. I remember Tony B'Liar signing us over to Europe without asking us. I thought it was 94 because that's the year I left the company I was at at the time, but 93 makes more sense as I'd also remembered it being some time before I left. People talk about the eu as though it's always existed, but I remember the eec and the eea, which I seem to recall existed concurrently as seperate legal entities, both as nothing more than a common market, in much the same way as the commonwealth was also a seperate alliance of independent nations. I remember the day when Tony B'Liar's 'New Labour 'won. Everyone was so excited that John major and his conservatives had gone. I was gutted because all I could think about was how at my age then, I was regularly going out clubbing and mingling with the ladies, whereas both my grandads at that age would be suffering trench foot, malnutrition, permanent hearing loss, extreme fatigue, the sorrow of seeing best mates physically ripped apart before their very eyes, cold, heat, disease, pure horror for 5 years, all to keep Britain independent and for what? Some self serving weasel of a former solicitor from a privileged background to just give it all away without so much as asking the opinion of the people that elected him.
I forgot to add that we went decimal in Feb 1971. It created big business for the cash register manufacturers as they had teams of salesmen out telling retailers that they wouldn't be able to cope without buying a new till! There were nearly 200,000 shops in the UK at the time. It didn't go quite as well as they thought as there were still some 'old timers' who could still add things up in their heads. We had an old fashioned manual till (like in Open All Hours) that you pressed the numbers, needed a bit of strength, on the keys and the price to the customer popped up in the window at the top. We just stuck bits of paper over the keys and the pop ups with the new currency written on them.
I think that you should actually say what you think and don't beat around the bush. Oh! I forgot I'm not supposed to use that last word in the sentence when talking about the weasel!
I'm only stating facts. Conclusions I leave to others. The UK tried to join the EEC both in 1963 and 1967 but De Gaulle opposed us. Some say that changing to decimal in '71 was part of the trigger for acceptance.
John Major signed the Maastricht Treaty. The Amsterdam Treaty which Blair signed was just a tweaking of that.
Apropos of nothing and a piece of useless information (prompted by the above post):- D'artagnan (the real one) was Captain of the Musketeers of the Guards to Louis XIV, and Governor of Lille, and died at the Siege of Maastricht
What annoys me than anything is that myself and brothers and sisters and school friends went all through our school years being taught the old imperial system and then all of a sudden on February (?)1971 this new decimal system was brought in without us being taught any of it and then I had less than four months to learn it all before I left school for good to start work. They then started on all this metric rubbish which I still haven't grasped and whenever we take our cat to the vets to be weighed I always ask our Australian vet what the weight is in English I have always said if I could have had kids then I would rather have home schooled them instead of sending them to school as I am sure I would have done a better job of educating them than the school did for me We love watching the Muskateers on the telly every week as well
Although I started out on imperial, I dont think I would want to go back to using it for measurement, although I still think in imperial but convert it in my head when just making a guess. Weights I still do in imperial, and the money, well the £sp have gone, if we had carried on with it I'm sure it would still be working OK. But wouldn't want to go back now, unless of course they put in a price reduction, as I seem to remember prices were rounded up to suit the new money at the time. Remember my 10d bus fare suddenly became 5p.
Are you using real cubits or just counting them as 18"? If real, and Roman, then it's closer to 17". Then, of course, you have all the other cubits including the short cubit and the long cubit
