Well, I decided that as I felt so much better having vented my spleen re the mangling of the language, I would try again for the same cathartic effect with some of my other bugbears. By the way, I'm unhappy that my favourite punctuation mark (the exclamation mark) is not recognised on this text entry thingumy jig and therefore I am deprived of my usual over-enthusiastic usage of said punctuation. However, you will just have to use your imagination as to where I would have randomly placed exclamation marks. (Yes, that would have been one of them.)

Unusually for one of my advancing years, I am all in favour of metrication. Yes, I remember the days when a threepenny bit would buy you two ounces of pineapple chunks on the way to school, but I do not look back fondly on those times. Let's face it, pounds and ounces are just downright baffling, and when you get to acres, rods, chains, furlongs etc. then you've completely lost me. When God was a lad every school exercise book had a conversion table at the back telling you how many rods were in a perch (honestly) but it never made sense to me. Therefore, I've decided that it's time to take metrication to its logical conclusion - let's metricate time.

It could take some time to work out the finer details, and by someone with a more logical brain than mine, but I'm convinced that it is possible. After all, pre-decimalisation there were 240 pennies in a pound (if my memory serves me) and twelve in a shilling and if that makes sense to you then you're weirder than I am. So, we could start with months in a year - I suggest 10 would make sense. Of course, days in a month would also have to be some logical multiple of 10, for the sake of argument, let's say 40 - okay then, 50 makes more sense. If we decide to keep weeks as a measurement of time, they would probably have to be made up of 10 days, or possibly 5, and each of those days should perhaps have 20 hours rather than the rather untidy 24. So far, so good. How about 500 days in a year? Does that sound reasonable? When it gets to the finer details of minutes and seconds, my head starts to hurt, but I'm sure someone out there will take up the challenge to help me metricate time! One really GOOD THING to come out of this is that we would probably only have to celebrate Christmas once every ten years. I'll drink to that (exclamation mark).