Confusion

I kept to the new plan and went with the lemon cake.  After a slight crisis with the baking paper - I'm never buying anything that's not non-stick again, the faff with lining the baking tins is too much for me! - the cake went in and I made the filling, and now it's all cooling nicely.  So all I need to do now is build it up and ice it, which is my favourite bit anyway.

I went to the wee green grocers round the corner from my house for my lemons and they had a box of cherries out which looked lovely and tasty so I just went ahead and asked for some of them, but when the woman was putting them in a bag for me she asked if I wanted a quarter, so I said yes, thinking she meant a quarter kilo which is the perfect amount.  But then, when she gave me them there were about 7 cherries in the bag, so what did I get a quarter of??  Seriously, I know it must be something Imperial that frankly never even occurred to me, but what was it, a quarter pound or a quarter ounce?  How much even is an ounce, in grammes?

I thought that everything was sold in Metric nowadays and if you wanted Imperial you'd have to ask for it, but I guess not!  It's really annoying though, why can't everyone just let go of the old Imperial measurements and go with Metric, which is more accurate anyway!

Next time I go in there I guess I'll have to be really specific about how much I want!  Is it quite common to get things sold in Imperial measures, still?  It never occurs to me, in the supermarkets everything is sold in price-per-kilos and I wouldn't have a clue if you asked me to measure out a pound of something!

When I was living in Spain my American flat-mate went out to the fruit shop one day and came back with two big bags full of oranges... turns out he had no idea about Metric measurements so he asked for 2 kilos thinking that sounded like a reasonable amount, and then he was too embarrassed to say he didn't want them when he was presented with this mountain of fruit.  He was eating those oranges for about 2 months!