One of the many refreshing after-effects of the welcome quake called Brexit has been the rebirth of the English country village. Like the English country garden, it's a tradition with a language and system of weights and measurements all its own. It may be a small institution but there are those who love it. And would hate to lose it. Happily, the British show no signs of abandoning it. On the contrary, the way of life it represents is staging a hearty comeback, like a great forest after a fire has swept through it.
Besides, the European metric system has never been fully accepted by the British public anyway. Highway signs for British drivers, who stick to the left side of the road, show distances in miles and yards. Pubs pour pints of delicious draught beer, their sweetish taste only enhanced by not being frozen. Pints of milk are personally delivered door-to-door in glass bottles rather than pre-packed in plastic cartons. And gold and silver can still be sold by the troy ounce. Despite the European Union's officious demand that dealers in precious metals use the metric system.
The traders in those metals took their case for tradition to Britain's highest courts and Europe's, too. Yet lost on both levels. These martyrs to the metric system never gave up, though one of them would die--of a heart attack--soon after his case was rejected. To quote one of his fellow campaigners for the British way of life, "it is damnable that he dies a criminal owing to these totalitarian regulations." The English have gone their own at least since Napoleonic times, so why should outsiders get their knickers in a twist objecting to their ways? They may be quaint, but they're the Brits' own.
As G. K. Chesterton wrote in his poem "The Rolling English Road:"
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
Editorial on 09/12/2016