In Canada, Raedwulf, we are kinda sorta metric -- bulk foodstuffs such as flour are sold by the kilo, and we use American recipes so we measure out eight-ounce cups of it to make up our bread dough. Unless we have been to cooking school, in which case we do everything by weight and measure it out by the kilo and the gram, thus saving a heck of a lot of washing-up. I'm lazy like that, so, when I went to the Stratford Chef School to learn sourdough baking, I adopted the scale method with a glad cry.

In re: bread flour vs. all-purpose flour -- Most Canadian wheat is the hard, cold-climate type (Durum) that is particularly high in gluten, which is why mass-produced pasta the world over is generally made of Canadian flour. All-purpose flour here is half Durum and half soft wheat that could come from pretty well anywhere. If I buy flour from the mill at Arva about 40 km down the highway, which I try to do whenever I need flour, it's local Durum.

As for Edmund and feeling manky, in the 25 years I knew him, he was never manky once, let alone manky enough to be off his feed. The night he died, he put away most of a rib-eye steak with a heap of stir-fried veg and half a bottle of rather decent claret, and looked around for dessert before remembering that we had both taken a solemn vow to lose the five or so kilos of flab we put on while the whole province was locked down and the gyms were closed. But you're quite right; he always fussed and fumed when I was sick with bronchitis and not eating because the disease knocked out my olfactory functions.