CONVERTING

Sitting watching the football on t.v the other night with my son, he made a comment about a player being yards offside.I asked him why he had said yards offside,instead of saying that the player was metres offside,as i thought that they were now all taught metric at school, he said that it was because his teacher always says yards offside during games at school. I wondered if its something that's us Brits exclusively do,or does any other nation have to convert measurements,weights etc,it just seems to me that we are constantly converting something , the weather comes on the t.v and the forecaster says that its going to be 27 Celsius tomorrow,27 Celsius is that hot ? what is it in Fahrenheit ? You're on holiday and something costs so many euros, dollars whatever, and straight away you're trying to convert it back into pounds, It doesn't seem to register that you're in a different country and if you want to buy it,its going to cost whatever the seller is asking for it, in his currency. Another one is feet and inches, its all supposed to be metres and centimetres now, but it isn't, its a mixture of both, whenever i go into the timber yard for work i always ask for a sheet of 8 foot by 4 foot, 6 millimetre ply !Petrol is priced in litres, but beer is still sold in pints, any application form now wants to know how tall you are in metres and how much you weigh in kilos, but you're still working in feet and inches and stones and pounds. Is it any wonder that life's so confusing, and then, just when you think that you've encountered every conversion there is, suddenly theres a new kid on the block in the form of school years, where the hell did that come from, I'm now having to convert what years at school my kids are in !