On The British: - Hot and Cold -

[Geoff]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Steve" <bboyminn at ...> wrote:

Ste vet:
> Perhaps our resident expert can confirm or deny this assertion.
 
> I've been told that the British buy their gasoline (and similar fuel) by the Liter, but they measure its consumption in Miles Per Gallon. Though, I'm not sure what size their gallons are. 

Geoff:
We do indeed have to buy our fuel by the litre. You can thank the Blair 
government for that because they thought that metrication was mandatory in 
the EU and it wasn't. Fortunately, that didn't apply to miles anyway and there 
would have been a revolution if we'd gone down that line, I'm still in Toronto 
and ahve just got back there after a few days in the Haliburton Highlands and 
have been busily converting km to miles all day mentally to the benefit of the 
other passengers. I keep all my records in MPG and have written a spreadsheet 
to convert my litres to that. I can't get my head round l/100km yet. All I know 
is that because petrol has just hit 136p a litre (approx 204c) and my diesel
even higher at 142p (approx 213c), the fact that my Vauxhall Astra diesel does
about 49 MPG is very encouraging.

We use Imperial gallons which are 4.544 litres. 8 pints to i gallon.


Steve:
> However, I recently learned from Stephen Fry (yes, that Stephen Fry) that the British measure warm weather in Fahrenheit, but cold weather in Celcius. A warm summer's day is 85°F to 90°F, but a cold winter's day is -10°C. Though were I'm from -10°C is balmy. 

Geoff:
Stephen Fry ain't right.  Weather forecasts have been given in F and C for 
many years but in the last few years, they're all usually given in C. It's only older
folk, myself excepted, who tend to think in F. So a warm summer's day would
probably be in the range 25-30 C (77-86 F) and winter ranges +3- -2 C (37.4-
30.4 F) in the south.

Just for the record, we had the worst winter for 27 years from the end of October 
to the middle of January and, in our area, I found myself walking the dog in -6
on a few occasions. That may not be much to some of you, but since, in the 
coastal town where I live in the South west, we often only experience one hard
frost in a winter, that was incredible. We have then had the hottest April for
40 years. During the last couple of weeks, the temperature in the south has 
been in he range 21-24 C during the day whenthe usual average figure for the 
month is 13.

Steve:
> Moving back to Gallons, it is odd so much of the Imperial measurement carried over to the USA, but for some odd reason, we ended up with a different sized Gallon. 

> Before Metric, was the Imperial Gallon the Euro standard, or was it unique to the UK? Just curious on this point.

Geoff:
No. Most countries on the European mainland have used metric measurements for
a couple or hundred years or so.

This is because Napoleon instructed his advisers to produce a standard set of
measurements to be used in all the countries he conquered at the end of the 18th 
century.

He didn't manage to conquer Britain, which is also the reason why we still drive 
on the left hand side.