Miles Kington: A computer never knows it's a quarter to seven

I was sitting in the train going home the other day when the man opposite me leant over and said: "Excuse me, but have you got the right time?"

I glanced at my watch, said: "It's 13 minutes past six."

"That's interesting," he said.

"Interesting?" I said. (I should know better by now than to say things like that to people who are clearly looking for the merest toehold in order to clamber into a conversation.)

"Yes," he said. "It's interesting that you said '13 minutes past six' and that you didn't say '6.13pm' or 'nearly quarter past six' or indeed '18.13 hours'. There are so many different ways to say the time."

"Yes," I said, instead of the "So what?" which I really meant.

"Which is unfair on the young."

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't be sorry," he said. "It's not your fault."

"I'm not sorry," I said. "I only said I was sorry as a way of saying that I didn't understand what you were driving at."

"If only we all said what we really meant," he said, "we'd do a lot better."

"If we all said what we really meant," I said, "we wouldn't have any friends left, and we would be reduced to striking up conversations with total strangers on trains."

There was a strained pause. I relented. "So, why is it unfair on the young?"

"Well," he said, "because young people have become used to telling the time from their mobile phones or computers, and it is always done in terms of digits. 10.47, they say. 3.27. 1.04. A mobile phone never tells you that it is a quarter to seven."

"Right."

"But we don't talk like that. For the most part, we don't go around saying 'It's 6.45 pm'. We say 'It's a quarter to seven'."

"Right."

"Young people, however, tend to leave school increasingly innumerate, and half of them don't know what a quarter is."

"And I suppose a quarter of them don't know what a half is," I said. He ignored me.

"So what can it mean to them when we say, 'It's a quarter to seven'? They are used, if anything, to metrication and decimalisation. Everything, to them, is divided into 10. Even a mileometer on a car these days divides miles into tenths, even though there is no way a mile can be decimalised."

"Hold on," I said. "Are you saying that an hour should be divided into 100 minutes? So that the young can ignore quarters and tell the time properly?"

"Well," he said, "it would certainly help things. At the moment they don't understand how clocks work. Their mobile phone tells them it's 10.57. Then 10.58. Then 10.59. But then, instead of it going to 10.60, it suddenly goes to 11.00. Miles don't do that. Litres don't. Grammes and kilos don't. Why should minutes and hours do that?"

"Hmmmm," I said.

The man was clearly mad. On the other hand, he had a point.

"We used to think it was very important to master strange systems," he said. "We could calculate ounces and pounds and stones, and pints and quarts, and inches and feet."

"Some of us haven't got beyond inches and feet," I said.

"But all these strange antiquated systems finally went the way of the rod, pole and perch, and the furlong, and the ..."

"The ell?" I suggested.

"Ell?" he said.

"Old measure for cloth. Bolts and ells."

"Yes, well ..." he said.

"Give him an inch and he'll take an ell. That's what they used to say."

"Yes, well ..." he said.

"Leagues as well," I said. Nobody uses leagues any more, but we still talk about them. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. That was the name of the film. Not Twenty Thousand Miles Under the Sea. Of course it came from a Jules Verne book, so the French must have a word for 'League' as well. I wonder what the French for 'league' is ...?"

My method of dealing with bores is to bore them back. I droned on effortlessly, and the man fell silent,until he got out at Didcot Parkway. At 6.43. Nearly a quarter to seven. 18.43 hours. The trouble is, he's got me thinking about it and now, when someone asks me the time, I don't know what to say, so I don't tell them. I just show them my watch.