“Giz a pint of fizz, landlord”

“Right you are, guv. You fancy Krug Non-Vintage or Taitinger Blanc de Blanc?”

That was a picture that flashed through my mind when I found out that henceforth champagne would be sold in pints in Britain.

The picture included fragments of a Kings’ Head somewhere up country, a weathered mahogany bar, porcelain pump handles exhibiting various champagne brands, customers complaining the landlord gives them nothing but foam (“I’ll come for the rest later, mate.). The madcap vision lasted a few seconds before hard reality barged in.

No landlord in Britain will be able to pull a pint of Krug, not yet anyway. It’s just that champagne will now be sold in pint bottles, just like in the old days. Perfect for two people at lunch or for one thirsty gentleman at dinner. (For the benefit of my overseas readers, the imperial pint is 20 ounces, not 16 as in some of our former colonies.)

The conservative in me rejoiced. As Peter Hitchens correctly observed, the metric system was imposed on Europe by victorious revolutionaries, which in itself is sufficient reason to reject it. Yet Mr Hitchens has a knack for being annoying even when saying unobjectionable things.

In this case, he appealed not just to tradition but also to the intrinsic superiority of traditional measurement units. An inch, he wrote, is based on the length of a thumb, and a foot on the length of, well, a foot. That no doubt is historically true. Yet my thumb is much longer than an inch, and my foot (Size 9) is shorter than a foot. Then again, traditional measures go so far back that human anatomy might have changed since then.

Then came the annoying bit: Hitchens seldom misses an opportunity to remind readers of his first-hand experience of Russia where he spent a few months in the 90s. There, he said, food was often sold by the polkilo, which is basically a pound. Having thus established his bona fides as a Russian expert, he’ll doubtless explain in the next article that we shouldn’t support the Ukraine because the Ukraine and Russia are essentially the same, especially Russia.

According to him, polkilo means that even metric countries gravitate towards English measures. This is ignorant nonsense. Polkilo means half a kilo, 500 grams, more than a pound, which is 454 grams. The measure is clearly metric, and in fact Russians think in grams and kilos, not pounds. A shopper would routinely ask for 400 grams of sausage or 300 grams of cheese (provided those items were available).

Vodka was sold in half-litre bottles, affectionately called pollitra, or quarter-litre ones, known as chekushka. However, hardened drinkers referred to that kind of pollitra as polkilo, replacing the pedantic liquid measure with the colloquial hard one. Perhaps that’s what Hitchens had in mind when going on shopping expeditions, in which case re-spect, to quote Ali G.

Sorry for this bit of arcana, but I had to set the record straight. My own feelings about the two systems are mixed, as are my experiences of them.

Until I left Russia at 25, I had lived, thought and breathed in the metric system. In the subsequent 15 years, I had to reorient my mind towards American measures, and metric units dropped into the background.

I measured distances in feet and miles, temperature in Fahrenheit, length in inches and feet, liquid in ounces, pints and gallons, my burgeoning weight in pounds. After a few years, whenever someone mentioned a metric unit, I had to do a quick mental conversion.

Then came 35 years, almost 36 now, in England, and my weight got to be measured in stones, rather than pounds, which somehow made me sound almost svelte. After all, 15 sounds much less than 210, even if it isn’t.

Pounds and gallons got bigger in England, but miles remained the same, although weights and liquid measures again became metric. That made it next to impossible for me to judge a car’s economy. Specs talked about so many litres per 100 kilometres, and my mathematical ability doesn’t quite stretch to converting that into good old mpg.

In all honesty, I can’t say which system is better. Each has its pluses and minuses. For example, a millimetre is cumbersome to express in fractions of an inch. On the other hand, Fahrenheit is more precise than Celsius.

Yet it’s not all about face value. As a conservative, I welcome every attempt to keep modernity at bay, especially revolutionary modernity.

When an English greengrocer was notoriously arrested for selling bananas in pounds, I thought that bow towards the EU was evil. To this day, when I shop for food I ask for a pound of this or that. This often elicits the moronic question: “In weight?”. A pound in money buys nothing these days, doesn’t everyone know this?

Getting rid of metric measurements would have the huge symbolic significance of shaking the dust of the EU off our feet, which has to be good. Yet I can’t get rid of the gnawing suspicion that, when it comes to putting champagne in pint bottles, the motives aren’t so much conservative as pecuniary.

I’m willing to bet that a pint bottle will cost as much as the current 750 ml one. The British pint is 568 ml, which means we’ll be paying almost a third more for our glass of champagne. I’m not sure my commitment to conservative memorabilia outweighs the difference.

Then again, I buy my champagne direct from French producers, which means my commitment to conservatism won’t cost me anything in this case. I’m wiping my brow even as we speak.