A royal rule of thumb for measurements | Brief letters

Sizing up | Kind Hearts and Coronets | Accounting for taste | Deranged scumbags Regarding unusual measurements ( Letters, 13 March ), at the time of conversion to the metric system in the 1970s, a colleague proposed a novel set of standard units – the barleycorn, firkin, fortnight system. The barleycorn unit of length, based historically on one-third of the length of Henry VIII’s thumb to the first joint (about one inch); the firkin unit of weight equivalent to nine gallons of water; the fortnight unit of time – a micro-fortnight is about 1. 2 seconds.