BISHOP John Crowley of Middlesbrough, a former secretary to the late Cardinal Hume, told the story of a "steak of a lifetime" bought for Pope John Paul when he visited Britain in May 1982.

Asked at a news conference in Middlesbrough for a light-hearted story about the Pope, the bishop said: "The Sisters (who cook at Church House, Westminster) had prepared the menu for a year and I was sent to Smithfield market to buy the steak.

"I mentioned it to Cardinal Hume that evening and he said the following day would be Friday and the Pope might want to stick to the tradition - no longer an obligation - of abstaining from meat on a Friday."

The then Father Crowley then telephoned the Papal Nuncio's office in Wimbledon and was told: "If you have steak he would eat it out of courtesy, but normally he eats fish on Fridays." The bishop then had the job of telling the Sisters the menu would have to be changed. So a salmon was bought. And the cardinal's secretary had to eat steak all the following week.

Metric muddle

METRICATION is so much easier to handle in base ten than all those fuddy-duddy old imperial measurements requiring us to work in base 12, or 16, or three or any of the many bases involved in stones and hundredweights, chains and furlongs.

Unfortunately, an awful lot of us live in houses built to imperial measure and metrication at the DIY shop or the builder's merchants can throw up some odd problems.

Take the need for an 8ft lath. That would have to be cut specially, Sir. Why? Well, what would have been an 8ft lath is now 2.4 metres, or coming up for two inches too short. While it would seem reasonable to expect laths to leap in 0.5 metre jumps, they don't, because someone has decided that 30cm=1ft, but that's roughly 0.5cm short, which tots up across 8ft.

Metrication was meant to make life easier but waiting for something to be specially cut which used to be available in the rack hardly bears that out.

Steaming

SIMPLISTIC. Aimed at seven-year-olds and even a child thought it too young. A lazy approach to factual accuracy. These are all insults hurled at Locomotion: The National Railway Museum at Shildon in a national newspaper by a writer who cannot see why it is shortlisted for the Gulbenkian prize.

Fine. That's the view from London.

Things look a little different from here as, last week, the museum welcomed the 100,000th visitor to go through its doors in its first six months - and this was a museum expected to attract just 60,000 visitors a year.

With due respect to Serena Davies, it must be getting something right. Oh, and in Spectator's dictionary those buildings which house aircraft, and to which she likens the Shildon building, are hangars, not hangers