One thing that this heatwave has me puzzling is... SHOULD I move to Fahrenheit?
Ohh and how was Barcelona? ;-)
We flew back in from Barcelona on Saturday evening and since then it seems that almost everything I've read - TV news headlines, tabloid front pages, weblogs, the ingredients list on my morning box of cereals - has been focused on the UK's ambient temperature. It's hot; it's very hot; it's the hottest. Rails are a-bucklin' and people are a-faintin'. It's all one big, glorious opportunity to combine the British twin obsessions with The Weather and How Crap We Are and I guess that, in writing this, I'm merely adding to the phenomenon that I mockingly describe.
So, let me tell you this. Even British heat is crap. The day that we flew into Barcelona, the temperature was 41 degrees Centigrade. (Huh?) The following evening, wandering down La Rambla at around quarter to eleven, we noticed on one of those corporate digital clock/thermometer contraptions (a hopeless raiser of brand awareness, incidentally, because I have absolutely no idea whose it was) that it had dropped to a comparatively arctic 33 degrees. Yes, still working in Centigrade here.
The following few days were cooler. I think it only reached around 38 degrees during the day and fell further to around 29 overnight. As you can imagine, the meticulously planned Hg itinerary went out the window. We fell immediately into the Spanish timetable of "working" (albeit only on breakfast and doing the occasional languid lap of the hotel pool) between 9am and 2pm, then observing the siesta (on the sun loungers by the hotel pool) between 2pm and 4pm, followed by more work (shopping and sight-seeing) between 4pm and 9pm and then dinner between 10pm to midnight. It's a very civilised way to live and it was interesting to see the idea being half-seriously proposed for the UK in this weekend's Sunday Times.
Apart from the obvious differences of language, unfamiliar surroundings and superb food (How Crap We Are!), one of the main areas of "otherness" when travelling abroad is in the way our regular numeric scales are altered. Temperature and time were the two most significant for us in Barcelona, with currency forming a trio. Fortunately my work is mainly based in US Dollars, which have a broadly similar Sterling exchange rate to the Euro, so I'm used to mentally converting local prices to Pounds by multiplying by two-thirds (although I hadn't realised that the Euro had strengthened recently and that some of my "bargains" were not quite so good when confronted with the retrospective logic of the calculator).
The world's gone digital and so we're all obsessed with numbers these days. Our weight, our waists, the waiting time in the queue. I rarely see more than 5% of my salary pass through my wallet every month, because most of my financial transactions are handled virtually. A sixteen-digit number and an expiry date allows someone to take anything between a one- and four-digit number from my account, which usually starts off with a four-digit number on the 25th of the month and has dwindled to a two- or even one-digit number by the 24th.
In former times women - and occasionally men - could have their vital statistics defined as nn-nn-nn (as in 34-28-36) but now that wouldn't even tell one hundredth of the story. You'd need to include your National Insurance (Social Security) number, tax code, driving license number, passport reference, the amount of RAM on your computer and your annual salary. Anyway, in today's more commercially-minded world this numeric pattern tends to call to mind a bank sort code rather than the traditional tits-waist-bum definition. (And Dutch car registrations, I know.)
Clothing and shoe sizes were also notable in Barcelona. I try to be "bi-lingual" in both Imperial and Metric sizing, but what do you do when faced with shirt sizes along the lines of "T4", "T5" and "T6"? You do what you always do in an unfamiliar situation, I guess - take the middle ground, then work towards the appropriate extreme until it feels more comfortable, then stop when it starts to feel less comfortable. In many ways, the lack of familiarity is helpful. I remember that my UK shoe size 10 is a European 44, because the latter is totally unrelated to the former; also many UK retailers have started using the European sizes alongside their archaic UK equivalents (How Crap We Are!). In the USA, however, it took me absolutely ages to work out that there is a crucial difference of one between the UK and USA sizes. My "Size 10" was tight because it was actually a "Size 9". Or I'm a "Size 11", depending on which way you look at it.
It's all relative, as Einstein's uncle might have said. If these measurements are a way of attempting to gain control of an unpredictable world by making it rational and knowable, how do we react when all of our familiar scales are unbalanced? It can be bewildering or liberating, depending on your attitude to change, risk and chaos. There's a perception that in the UK we're not quite as good at change as other nations because we're less likely to fall into line with internationally recognised standards. Older people still think in Pounds, Shillings and Pence (LSD - the opiate of the populace), the middle-aged are still struggling with the more recent change to metric weights in the supermarket and even us wee babes raised on the metric system at school are still drinking pints of beer. We drive on the left, we prefer our plucky little Pound to the faceless Euro and we'd rather walk a million miles than 1609000 kilometers for one of your smiles. How Crap We Are! (Although maybe, in the case of that last example, Britain has the poetic edge.)
Back at work since the start of the week, my desk has been a blur of 128s, 256s and 512s. I've been calculating impact on the business (add three figures together and multiply by twelve) versus functionality (allocate a bandwidth requirement to each application and then multiply by the number of PCs). I've been craving WORDS all day and now I'm in full flow there is apparently no stopping me. Except, glancing at the bottom-right of the screen, I see that it's 23:35. I mentally subtract that from 06:20 and come up with the totally illogical answer of six and three-quarters. The hour is late and it's time to go and count sheep. Bona nit.
Posted by Hg on Tuesday 12 August 2003 at 23:35.
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