Queen Victoria, upon the British acquisition of a tiny island somewhere, described our empire as the one “where the sun never sets.” Perhaps I witnessed its setting.

I was working with a local carpenter to put up some battens for curtain rails in a house in Sunyani, Ghana – a former British colony. He suggested that I take measurements while he cut lengths of wood to size. I gave him the first measurement in centimetres.

“What’s that in inches?” he asked.

“Oh, you use inches, not centimetres.”

With his reply, the last stone fell from the crumbling edifice that had been the great British Empire.

“Yes. We got it from the Americans.”