Well I've just learned something that I never could understand. I always thought racing announcers needed glasses or, more likely, that I didn't understand how they call a race. At the finish they might say that a horse won by 2 links? Well I always thought they were saying 2 lengths and assumed that meant that a horse won by 2 horse body lengths.

Hubby was just sitting here telling me how he found an old glass jug down near the old cow yards that had gils on it and I was trying to remember how much a gil was. Metric came in towards the end of primary school for me so I kind of know both imperial and metric. A gil is half a pint or 300ml by the way. He then was talking about chains and links and surveyors and how horses won by 2 links.

Ahhhhhh, the penny dropped. How old am I? Older than I want to be but I've spent the last 30+ years thinking that horses were winning by 2 body lengths and that the horse racing callers were going mad and it was Links all along. A link, for those of you who don't know, is 20.12cm.

My husband did once have a really great old tape measure that had feet and inches on one side and Links on the other. Unfortunately I used it once......I had to cut some fencing wire, mesh, for the goats and I couldn't carry the roll so I measured how much I needed and went and unrolled the wire and cut it off. Problem was that by this time I had about 20 goats helping me as the roll of wire was sitting in one of their pens from the last use. I can't remember exactly how it happened but for some reason I was unable to carry the wire, the pliers and the tape measure back up the hill so I chose to leave the tape measure and pliers behind. I went straight back for them but it was too late. Someone had chewed the tape measure neatly in half.

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