Maree’s musings

MEASURE for MEASURE

How far? How long? Us mortals love to calculate distances so we can organise our time and space, possibly because chaos is worrying. Whether travelling from A to B or building a wall [sorry, Mr Trump], distance matters.

I’m sure most of us have pondered about the length of a piece of string, but that doesn’t matter unless it’s too short.

In modern times, we’ve generally got a bit boring with distance measurement. Since 1960, it’s been metrics and accuracy so we all know where we are and how far we have come. But habits die hard, so some oldies persist.

For example, a modern version of ‘give (him) an inch and (he’ll) take a mile’ would just sound silly, and ‘I love you to the moon and back’ says a lot, but not very accurately. ‘A miss is as good as a mile’ doesn’t update well either.

A horse’s height is still given in hands (10cm, give or take); the width of a human hand. Handy if you don’t have a ruler and the pony won’t stand still. However I do find it a bit of a worry that jet pilots still use their feet, even though they are not on the ground.

Measurement methods have a colourful history predating the convenience of having a (yardstick?) measure on hand. The long-used (short) inch ranged from ‘one-twelfth of a foot’ to the width of a Scotsman’s thumb, or if you couldn’t find a Scot, you’d need to lie ‘three grains of dry, round barley’ end-to-end, lengthwise. Incidentally, King Charlemagne’s foot stood as the standard. Charley only had two feet, so luckily the 12^th Century yard had already been invented. My 20^th Century dad (bless) used the same method – the distance from his nose to his thumb.

A mile is a long way, as Roman soldiers counting 2000 steps discovered. Dragging their feet was not an option. Of course, if you were ‘all at sea’, you’d have to fathom (pun) distance by jumping overboard and stretching your arms out. 880 times, in fact, before you’d sailed a mile. Estimating water depth this way doesn’t bear thinking about.

Humorous Finns invented the poronkusema – the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to pee – around seven km. With my advancing age and female nether regions there’s no way I could match that, even at a fast jog – which considerably shortens the distance, anyway!

In Colombia, with horse transport, cinco puros translates into ‘five cigars’. For the rider, naturally. This might be 7.5km at a gallop, but more likely about three puros to the poronkusema. And in the Andes, cocadas. More convenient than ‘lighting up’ – these are wads of coca leaves with lime. Chewing the same ‘causes all fatigue to vanish’ – a useful side effect. However, it meant that the downhill distance was half that of going up. Not that you’d notice if you were stoned, I guess.

French peasants got on the wagon with this too. A piper – how far one pipe of tobacco could take you. Apparently ‘milestone’ tobacco stalls at intervals allowed travel to continue unabated. Perhaps someone could invent a kiwi alternative but with a safer drug. ‘Coffeemetres’ perhaps? One I read recently measured distances in numbers of cellphones laid end to end. Imagine the effort!

Today, however, accuracy is paramount. The metric system is based on the metre: 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of orange-red light emitted by a krypton-86 atom, or one-ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Exactly 39.37inches. Or about 118 barleycorns. Whatever.