Pounces and ounds

My head has been swimming lately with ounces and pounds and grams and baking powder and soda and hops and pounces and ounds. I have been confounded by questions about how many volumetric US kilograms are in a measured imperial thimbleful of beaten eggs, confuddled with abstruse questions such as how many dessert spoons are equal to a half of a third of four times of seven eighth of a pinch of a volumetric tonne of active years, and positively befounded with the problem of what to do with a bunch of egg whites once you have used the yolks if no-one wants meringues and you are sick of pavlova.

I have, in short, been cooking and brewing, planning further brewing and cooking, and preparing for the further excesses of Christmas. Or at any rate I have been doing a great deal of thinking about it and planning for it, which is almost as much trouble, and possibly even more angst-ridden. (What if it doesn't work? What if it explodes? What if nobody wants it? What if I'm leaving it too late?) It's that last one that's really starting to get me...

The other day, in preparation for the gourmet excesses that were to come, I went forth into the city on the grand and important task of collecting vegetarian suet. Vegetarian suet doesn't exist, of course - suet is a fat they collect from around the hearts of animals - so as you can imagine my investigation was made somewhat difficult. Eventually I found a store in the centre of town which stocked something called 'suet', and vegan to boot, which is to say it was probably made out of plastic. coincidentally, almost everything else in that store seemed to be made out of plastic as well, including the plastic wrapping on the buns, the plastic chocolates, and the life-save plastic monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, sitting in a homely manner in the chair on the opposite side of the store, kindly surveying my purchase of said plastic suet.

Will it work? Will the pudding explode? Who knows, but I'm certainly looking forward to giving it a red hot go tomorrow, with extra lashings of anxiety and brandy to boot.