Appoint kings and presidents ad nutum

It keeps them on their toes

“The Queen,” my father announced one day long ago at the after-dinner table, as he reached for another chunk of Stilton to plonk upon his Jacob’s cream cracker, “insists that her tea be made with water at eighty degrees.”

The most surprising aspect of this announcement was perhaps the fact he quoted a temperature that had been defined by Swedish physicist Anders Celsius (1701–1744) and not one which had been defined by Polish physicist Daniel Fahrenheit (1686–1736), whose scale of temperature even I had been raised on at school. Celsius died age 43, and Fahrenheit at age 50, and these ages do not convert; since, on Fahrenheit’s scale, Celsius should have departed this world age 10, and on Celsius’s Fahrenheit should have popped his clogs at age 106.