G LEDGER promotes the idea that metric measures are the most easily understood as well as the most "sophisticated and efficient" way of measuring and suggests "the anti-metric argument is a backward-looking one" (Letters, August 23).

Well, give them 25.4 millimetres and they'll take 1,609.344 metres.

Perhaps he is unaware the metre is based on a tiny fraction of the distance that white light travels in a vacuum per second, while a yard is based on the distance from your nose to your outstretched hand. Mmmm!

If metric is so desirable and so popular, why do I, like millions of other English men and women, think in imperial? Why, in a so-called free society, was Steven Thoburn, a market trader from Sunderland, secretly filmed and then convicted of committing the crime of selling a pound of bananas for 34p?

The answer to this is the EU metrication directive from Big Brother Europe, telling us we have to change. Yet last week the City of York Council was found to have broken our English law because they had erected path-markers in metric and were forced to change them to our traditional, (or as G Ledger would have us believe, cumbersome and difficult) imperial measures. Mmmm.

If I follow his argument correctly, then logically we shall need to metricate all other things such as time, for example. We could have ten or 20 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour... so much more efficient. When did we vote for metrication? Will Shylock now have to cut a kilogram of flesh?

Eric Wood,

Oakdale Road,

Clifton Moor, York.

Updated: 11:04 Thursday, August 25, 2005