WELL, IT ALL went pear-shaped at the Webb family Christmas dinner, and I blame Napoleon Bonaparte, his coterie of scientific toadies and the irksome penchant of the French for endlessly interfering with the natural order of things.

The insidious doings of the garlicky set across the English Channel were hardly foremost in my mind as the festival season loomed. In fact, visions of culinary wonders danced in my head as an old flying pal, Bob Button, and his wife Regina, arrived on a pre-Christmas visit bearing gifts of grits, corned beef hash and, holy of holies, four boxes of vanilla wafers.

Now the chances of coming across vanilla wafers in England are right up there with finding the Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona or a cigar in the Oval Office humidor. Which should explain my appropriate, if sick-making, display of abject simpering, after which I set about plotting a fitting gastronomic future for these little golden-brown nuggets.

And what could be more fitting, reasoned I, than a good, old-fashioned, banana pudding, to show my very English wife and dinner guests that American gustatory interest was not limited to great chunks of barely dead steer hanging off the edge of tables, toilet bowl-sized dollops of ketchup, and any and all things starting with Mac.

Banana puddings are among the fondest memories of my youth, a fact even more remarkable in that they were produced by my mother, a woman whose cooking talents as a rule could put water under threat from scorching. (My father's contributions, on the other hand or perhaps foot, included chicken a la king that bore a daunting resemblance to a cast-off in Prof. Frankenstein's collection of second-hand brains.)

Since cooking was a quite dead leaf on my particular limb of the Webb family tree, I asked some friends on the Internet if they had a recipe for banana pudding. What I found was that everybody I know from Maine to San Mateo has a recipe for banana pudding - some even two or three, in case of fire, flood or sudden onset of Alzheimer's gets the original.

After about three days of sifting through this avalanche, I settled on a formula entitled Grandma's Banana Pudding. (Actually, there are at least seven Grandma's etc. recipes, each subtly different from the others, so I tried taking a bit from each. This, it seems, is about like weaving a single suit from a mixture of wool, silk, cotton and polyester.)

Anyway, the early portions of the Yuletide feast went down well - even the turkey, once we had patched over the bits that our little gray cat, Currant Bun, had chomped out once he had maneuvered the bird onto the more easily accessible arena of the kitchen floor tiles.

Time for dessert, and I proceeded to serve up Al's version of Grandma's banana pudding. It looked handsome enough, and spoons descended rapidly. This was followed by the equally rapid descent of ponderous silence - the sort that one might expect after the first nibble of, say, an underdone fricassee of duck-billed platypus cooked in a rubber inner tube.

I tried a bite. To say it was a bit on the sweet side would be like describing the Wall Street Crash of '29 as a market blip, or the Atlantic Ocean as a tad damp. Whole pancreases could have shriveled up and dropped to the floor like so many blackened clinkers beneath the table at our Christmas repast.

It didn't take long to figure what had happened, and who was responsible. The recipe was written in U.S. measures, but the cups, spoons and scales and all that I have to cook with are all in metric thingies like grams and liters and kilos - plus a smattering of imperial (English) measures such as ounces, teaspoons and tablespoons which I discovered, to my horror, were up to 20 percent bigger than their U.S. equivalents.

In short, nearly all the measures I used in whomping up Grandma's best were badly out of kilter, and for much of this I hold Napoleon responsible. The metric system was cooked up during the French Revolution by scientists who had too much spare time on their hands and were perhaps a little envious of the success of their fellow grandee, one Dr. Guillotin, whose cure for headaches was proving ever so popular with les grandes roqueforts in Paris.

Napoleon, between bouts of lopping off heads, scratching his gizzard and helping convince the bourgeoisie that eating snails was a better way of controlling snails than drowning them in English ale, then imposed it on the countries he conquered.

Which helps explain why in the back 0.914 meters (yard) of Francophone countries to this day, they don't have 28.3 grams (an ounce) of common sense about proper measurement systems, they stick their 30.5 centimeters (foot) into it every time they try to justify metrics, and if given 2.54 centimeters (an inch) they will take 1.61 kilometers (a mile) in imposing it on the unwary elsewhere in the world.

Some years ago, Britain unwisely agreed that someday, it too would join the ranks of metric mediocrity. One tiny village in the West of England got so carried away by the concept that it immediately uprooted all its "30" (miles per hour) signs and replaced them with "50" (kilometers per hour). The local populace came under instant threat of decimation by motorists who thought "50" meant 50 mph, and the experiment was ended.

And so it all should. An inch should be, as it has been for centuries, the length of the thumb joint of one of the ancient King Edwards, a foot was just that long and a yard was the circumference of a man's waist. Winston Churchill won a war with them, and the U.S. has happily survived without the French Malady (save for the time its scientists mixed up imperial and metric and tried to land a Mars probe somewhere near the planet's center).

France's 18th century leaders got themselves into a heap of trouble when, as part of their metrification of all things, they concocted the 10-day week. Not the best idea to present to a bunch of tired and hungry Parisian sans-culottes, whose demand for bread had already been met by an unwise, smart-aleck remark from the Queen to "let 'em eat cake." (Alas for her, spin-doctors had not yet been invented, and she quickly left for a headache cure.)

The know-alls and their 10-day week were quickly dispatched to the dustbin of history, along with their silly, new-fangled names for the months like "Floreal," "Germinal" and "Thermidor." And their successors risk a similar fate if, with their daft collection of grains and grams and liters, they keep ruining people's banana puddings.

Thought for the Week: Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician.

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