One of the finer features of the market in Walthamstow is the "Panda Boll' system of weights and measures. 'Panda Boll', or 'Pound-a-bowl', is a system whereby traders use plastic tubs (which do not vary generally in size from one stall to another), to lay out the portion of vegetables they have on offer. For those who want to merely shop with their eyes, eyebrows and assorted smiley head-noddings, this is a wonderful way of avoiding that embarrassing moment of mutual incomprehension which can ensue when a trader from Chingford yells his joke about the dogdy dvds being flogged by the Chinese pirate gang to his mate on another stall while bagging up the carrots and onions of, say, a West African 7th Day Adventist matriarch, and then turns to her with a grin and says 'I'm rye ain', I daarlin?'. The darling, of course, has no idea at all how right he is about the porn under discussion, but is happy with the vegetables and hands over her two pounds for the purchases she's made.

Some traders seem to speak virtually no English other than traders' pidgin mockney. Others are actually quite cultivated when not putting on their Gor Blimey acts for each other and the buying public. All happily gabble, shout and sing out the mantra 'Panda Boll' to a public whose members are often also barely conversant with Estuary, let alone Queen's English, no matter how well educated they often are in their mother tongues.

This is not just a system used and loved by glottlestopping 'locals' - there is a Sri Lankan stall holder who summons up the full dexterity which fluency in one of the fastest spoken languages in the world provides to recite 'Panbabollpandabolpandabollpandaboll' as if he were practicing for a big game in the Walthamstow Kabaddi league.

The advantage for customers is that they can see exactly what they are going to get for their pound in advance, unlike in some places where the stall holder will turn from the provender displayed to weight up vegetables from boxes behind him or her on the stall (whether in metric or imperial measures, such stallholders have to be watched like hawks).

There are stalls in Walthamstow, of course, that have scales. One can't actually buy goods on them in the way that advocates of the metric system seem to think people should. For instance people do not ask for 830 grammes of pork in a butcher's, or 245 grammes of sugar. They would be thought mad. They round up or down to a standard unit. It could be a pound or it could be a kilo. Locally, prices are often put up in both systems.

Those who love the kilo should get it into their heads that the standard unit of sale is rarely a kilo, even in the metric system. It is too big. That is the same here as it is in other countries. In China, for instance, where metric measures are used, the standard unit on a market of 500 grammes is called a Jin. No one buys a kilo of anything - they buy two Jin. In other places long associated with being completely metric, such as France, many people in fact still buy and think in livres, or pounds.

It is said that we should all use kilos, and that many British people no longer use pounds. Or that using pounds and kilos is confusing. Interestingly, the only people who ever say this never say that they are confused themselves - it is often some mythical older person who is supposed to have no clue.

Some try to make the issue into one relating to 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities', saying that foreigners are so stupid they can't see when something is in an 'unfamiliar' unit. An unfamiliar unit never stops anyone buying the stones in their diamond rings in carats I notice. In Walthamstow, where many people come from countries that use kilos, its interesting that on our market people seem to prefer to buy by the 'Boll'. They tend to want to make the comparisons by looking at the goods in the bowl, picking up the bowl, poking or gently squeezing the items in it, smelling the items and lifting a few up and seeing if something rotten is lurking beneath. They can easily see if a stall-holder has more in his bowls than another trader, and can easily pick the bowl wanted from among the many the trader will have set out.

It seems to me that people who can carry out these basic measurements by eye are quite capable of working out that an English pound is smaller than a kilo - because it self evidently is, and also because prices quoted in it are smaller than when the corresponding price in kilos is put up next to it, as it often is.

The standard unit on a market can be anything, as long as that anything is also being used by the stalls next door, and we can see how the prices compare. 'Panda Boll' serves that purpose.

Oh, but people can't use their eyes or common sense and some people don't speak any other language than their own and its hard to learn another language, I hear the Trading Standards Officers say , justifying to themselves threatening a trader with a huge fine and jail. Rot. I once read somewhere that 95% of the people who speak a second language on this planet didn't even learn it in school. They usually did it buying food. My mother is no linguist. But learning Arabic opened a whole new world for her when she was in her fifties, buying food in markets in Khartoum. Learning the basics of a language is, truth be told, far easier than most, though not all, language teachers would have us believe.

Learning is, of course, the basis of trade. It is also fun, and not beyond the wit of most people who can get themselves a few thousand miles round the planet to live in a different neck of the woods. Why travel if not to learn new things, even if it is English as she is really spoke?

If someone who really has jetted in from a totally different place doesn't know what an unfamiliar unit is or means, the solution is simple. They ask. 'How much?' 'Please let me look?' 'Can I feel it?' 'Can I have some more?' 'Can I have fewer?'. Maybe they are not yet fluent in English, but going to the market is one good way to learn. Start with the 'Panda Boll's, knowing that the answer to 'How much?' is 'a pound', and pretty soon they will have the confidence to say, 'Can I have two?', 'Do you have two?', 'How do you do?'

In nearby Hackney, these obvious truths have escaped the authorities, who rather than cleaning up the corruption in their own council offices have treated the public as stupid. To protect them, they have been persecuting market traders who have tried to serve the real public and make a living at the same time by trading using the same customary weights and measures as we use in Walthamstow (Panda Boll and pounds) alongside the kilo. Their trade has been conducted in pretty much the same way as our traders openly, and popularly, do it here.

The prosecutions have been a vindictive disgrace and a gross waste of public money. For the victims the process has been expensive and traumatic. I am pleased to read that the government has decided to act and stop this nonsense, though, in the usual New Labour way of never solving a problem immediately when they can let it fester on. Nevertheless they are calling an end to such prosecutions by local authorities, which is a good thing.