The Reverend Rob Millner will be with us over Christmas. If you are thinking of getting married, why not come along and let him marry you?

Peter will be playing drums on NYE. I'm not sure if he can marry you, but don't worry, Rob can marry you all!

We have inches of snow in Berlin. There may be centimetres of it too, but if I want a bucket of snow I always take the inches and leave the metric bits.

I always take my shoes in imperial measurements. 9 1/2 is quite big enough without wanting to go to 44. Your feet would be at the bar before the rest of you had entered the pub.

If I put a gallon in my car, I know how many miles I can drive on it. You'd be lucky to get a mile with a piddly litre.

If I walk a mile, theoretically my feet will touch the ground 1760 times, which is quite poetic, somehow. If you walk a kilometre you will arrive in 1000 paces if you walk like a long-jumper, which is a tiny bit obvious. I can imagine what an entertaining bunch of characters that committee was that settled on the standards. I like to think there may have been one maverick:

"Why not 11!"

but I fear that is just wishful thinking.

If you want to fool the tourists, it makes sense to have a currency system that no-one can understand. For instance, you could have 12 pennies in a shilling, and 20 of those in a pound, making 240 pennies. If that didn't do the trick, you could also have guineas of 1 pound and a shilling, or 252 pennies, but by this time you would probably have confused yourself.

Then, if there were three of you at the end of the day dividing up your ill-gotten spoils, each of you would get 80 pennies, or 6 shillings and 8d (notice the "d" for a penny!), which is a fairly round number compared to what you would get if you tried to divide a euro by 3: 33.333 recurring cents. That must be a very rare coin, for I have never seen a recurring cent.

However, if I was in a three-legged race, I would definitely prefer a kilometre to a mile.

A very happy Christmas and New Year to all my fans, or "A" and "B" as I call them, for short.

©2012 kidulis