The world’s traditional weights and measures are amongst the few remaining living links we still have with our most distant ancestors – from the pre-literate tribesmen who would measure the height of their livestock with the width of their hands to the invaders from Rome who counted out their marches in thousand-pace units, the mille passus, our mile – And I cannot for the life of me understand how abolishing all of this in favour of a made-up system designed for tidy-minded bureaucrats is anything but the most shocking and ignorant cultural vandalism.
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An astronaut enjoyed my first book so much that he took my picture to space. This does sound pretty incredible and I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have some evidence. I’ve got a photograph of Piers Sellers (the spaceman) holding a photocopied jacket shot of me against the window of a space shuttle. You can see Planet Earth through the glass, 115 miles below.
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