Don't worry about it Marianna! We really are increasingly bi-metric, to the extent that when I am buying wood, it is usually "3 metres of 4 inch by two inch," or some such blend. My wife buys curtain material by the metre, but its width is still measured in inches.
I am told, BTW, and I have no idea of the truth of this, that the construction industry in Scandinavia finds that the metre is an inconvenient measure, so have invented a measure which is one third of that length - in other words, about the same length as the imperial foot.
The secret lies, I guess, in the fact that the old measures were based on human activity and human dimensions, so fit humans well. For instance, the League (as in "seven-league boots") was the distance that a man and pack horse could walk in one hour, therefore varied in linear distance from one terrain to another. (In the fairy tales, of course, the person with seven-league boots could complete a day's journey in one step!) It has died out, I suppose, because we no longer need that sort of measure - it is a matter of how many miles we do in an hour rather than hours to complete a mile!
But metric measurements are based on an estimate of the world's circumference made in the 1790s! What sort of basis is that, I ask you!
