Three signs that you're going native

You measure your life not in years, but in hurricanes

The other day, Pam was reading an ad in the local paper for cheap contact lenses and asked when was the last time I got my eyes tested. I thought for a moment, and then replied: "Ike". She said: "Oh", and went back to her reading.

My monosyllabic response was New Orleans shorthand for September 2008, when hurricane Ike devastated Galveston, Texas. We got off lightly, just catching the edge of the storm, which also caused serious flooding in parts of Louisiana.

I associated it with getting my eyes tested because I was waiting to see the optician on that day. Someone came through the door from the street, and the wind sneaked in behind them, picking up every single piece of loose paper in the shop and sending it whirling into the air.

Later that afternoon, we were walking out of a furniture store and couldn't open the door. It was closing time, so I asked the assistant to unlock it. "No, it's not locked," he said. "It must be the wind holding it shut."

It's not the most accurate measure of time, but you'll often hear people here referring to an event as having occurred between Katrina and Rita, or a few weeks after Andrew.

Incidentally, we recently met a friend of a friend whose name was Katrina. I was itching to ask all the obvious questions you ask someone called Katrina who lives in New Orleans, but I tactfully kept my mouth shut - it's a bit like being in Munich and meeting a man called Hitler.

You measure your weight not in stones, but in pounds

Another friend of a friend recently told me he weighed 250 pounds, and for the first time I didn't try to divide this by 14 in my head.

Until very recently, and like most Brits over a certain age, I weighed myself in stones. I have no idea why we still use this medieval unit of measurement, but I've finally managed to kick the habit.

It's amazing how the Americans, even more than the British, have clung to the wreckage as the rest of the world is swept away by the tide of metrication. Their weather forecasts are in Fahrenheit, their milk comes in quarts and gallons, and when I helped my father-in-law in Tennessee to build the roof of his new extension last year, he would get impatient when I couldn't instantly work out the difference between ten and five sixteenths and ten and three eighths.

Though as The Onion once reported, there are grounds for hope: a new generation of urban dwellers has become intimately familiar with grammes, litres and cubic centimetres.

You measure distances in hundreds of miles, not in miles

We were driving back from seeing Pam's daughter in Little Rock, Arkansas a couple of weekends ago, and I glanced at the GPS and said: "Not far now. It's only a couple of hundred miles."

It was then that I realised how much my perception of distance had changed since leaving my tiny, teeming homeland. Today, I think nothing of driving 450 miles, the distance from London to Inverness in northern Scotland, just to attend Pam's grandson's third birthday party.

Speaking of the GPS, there's a little game I play on long journeys. I'm trying to find the longest distance it instructs me to drive before I have to do anything. The best I've found so far is when we join the I55 interstate heading south towards home, and the GPS says keep left in 157 miles. I'm sure I'd find far better examples if we lived in west Texas or Nevada or somewhere.