Much debate here in London and the south-east about the height of the wall over which a person at a party attended by Ken Livingstone fell and injured himself.

'15 ft', yelled the 'Evening Standard'.

'Our Ken' was so incensed that the day after the news reports surfaced, he took time off from governing London to take a tape measure and measure it himself: result, a smidgeon over 10 feet (subsequently confirmed by others). It turned out later that the London ambulance staff who were called out to the scene estimated the wall's height as '15 feet' - the source of the 'Standard' piece.

Local radio did a feature asking people how high certain walls were - lovely to listen to... 'about eight-and-a-half feet', 'ten feet', 'twelve feet' etc.

Not a metric measurement to be be seen or heard in all of this. Truly customary measures are the people's language and metric is the language of the elite.

As for the 64,000-dollar question, did he fall or was he pushed? (by Ken Livingstone), no-one is ever likely to know as they were all too drunk/stoned to remember what happened!

Tony Bennett

Nice one Tony.

So to summarise, actual measurement revealed the height of the wall to be a smidgen over 10 feet, but the ambulance crew thought 15 feet, an error of 50%.

So where does that leave the argument about imperial being more natural and easy to visualise than metric?

The ambulence crew dramatised it in order to appear more heroic, perhaps...

15 ft was quoted by The newspaper.

And I thought newspapers never exagerated!

(think about it....)

Clearly the difference is due to traffic charging. You can fall 10ft for free, but the remaining 5ft costs £5 a day.