Before I begin the free-for-all, I want to pay tribute to a family member who passed away recently. Thor was full of life, but sudden ill health saw him rapidly deteriorate recently and he was humanely euthanised just short of his 14th birthday. He was the best dog a family (my in-laws) could ever have. OK, so Lassie was probably the best dog a family could ever have, but Thor came a very very close second. We'll miss you wagging your tail so hard it hit the side of chairs in the dining room, opening a flesh wound under the fur and leaving a bloody smear on everyone and everything you came to investigate for hours after. See you on the other side, big guy.

OK, serious stuff over. Time for the fun. Hey kids, it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I mean it. The last two weeks it has snowed. A lot. I'm a poor English lad and all this American weather is still new to me. I'm still adjusting to the whole Fahrenheit-Celcius thing (18 degrees... convert it and it's either in the mid-sixties or eight degrees below zero). Don't get me on the subject of conversions... it's bad enough that my genius of a wife (and I mean that most sincerely, her IQ is over 130) sometimes doesn't know how many fluid ounces in a cup (8 fl.oz = 1 cup). How many rods are in a furlong, how many gills in a hogshead and how many grains in a pound? I have trouble remembering...

You'll go far in life if you said 40 rods, 2016 gills and 5760 grains.

You'd get further in life if you knew there were 1,000 grams to a kilogram, 10 centilitres to a litre and 100 centimetres to a metre and just adapted, America. Go on! 96% of the world's population manage just fine without knowing that there are 16 ounces in a pound and 14 pounds in a stone, and most of us can count in tens, hundreds and thousands right now! You already know what 2 litres looks like, after all... judging from the number of Vanilla Coke bottles I see in those shopping carts every weekend! Ho ho ho!

Seroius point on the subject, Americans: imagine if there were 12 cents to something called a 'shilling' and 20 shillings to a dollar. That's right kids, 240 cents to your dollar. There would be a new quarter-cent, half-cent, two-cent, three-cent and six-cent (half a shilling) coin. The nickel would become obsolete, the dime would be worth 24 cents, an old quarter would be called the five-shilling piece (60 cents) and the half-dollar would now be the ten-shilling (worth 120 cents).

If you had $2-1s-3c (two dollars, one shilling and three cents) and split it equally three ways, what would you all have? That's right, kids. A headache! The currency I have just explained isn't some far-fetched mental head-screw either... the pound-shilling-pence was the official currency system of Britain until 1971. The Beatles counted out their pound notes this way. No wonder John Lennon moved to the States.

Back to my life, now I've tried to convert you to the metric system. The Xmas shopping has been done, the house-hunting is on hold for now and tomorrow we go to see "The Return Of The King". I waited the length of "The Two Towers" before it dawned on me that Shelob's Lair would have to wait for another year. Have no idea who Shelob is? Read the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, your brain will thank you for it. I tried reading them after enjoying "The Hobbit" as a thirteen year-old and couldn't get into them at all. Beth got me to look at them anew a few years ago and I tore through them (and even finished "The Silmarillion" to boot). She has me reading the Harry Potter books now. I know that someone dies at the end of "The Order Of The Phoenix"... I don't know who it is yet, but I'm near the end of Harry's 5^th year at Hogwarts so don't spoil it for me.

I would reveal what I got everyone for Christmas but they'd read this and have nothing to look forward to. So I'll save that for after the holidays.

Listen : The Bionic Jam - The Baldwin Brothers ... The Christmas Waltz - Frank Sinatra.