After six months in Beijing, I’m still in the pinch-me-I-must-be-dreaming stage.

But while six months is clearly — in my case — not enough time for the shine to wear off, it’s long enough to notice one or two niggling little things that can make life difficult.

The language barrier is ever-present, of course, and will only be fully torn down and remodeled into a nice coffee table after I learn to speak fluent Chinese – something I expect will happen right around the time the Beatles reform and perform in purple tutus on the Ed Sullivan Show.

There is also the ever-present risk of inadvertently offending someone because of my ignorance of the nuances of Chinese culture. I wrote once before on this page about the ructions I caused in the park when I peeled off my shirt beneath the sweltering sun. I offended another dear friend recently while talking, wagging my finger under her nose as I made my point. Where I come from that is not offensive, I assure you.

But, while I am always worried about ‘putting my foot in it’, I’m starting to relax, having learned the Chinese are pretty good at making allowances for us foreigners.

But one little issue that has been with me since ‘day one’ is my incomprehensible difficulty in getting to grips with the money.

Just how much did I earn? And just how much does this thing cost? These are questions I can only satisfactorily answer — having a brain the size of an Olympic diver’s swimming trunks — after I convert RMB into money I am familiar with.

So, I tend to go through the challenging (for me) process of figuring out what the said item costs in Canadian dollars (divide by seven).

Then, invariably, I remember that this is not enough.

You see, for the entire 14 years I lived in Canada, I converted Canadian dollars into British pounds (divide by 2.2) — the currency of my formative years. So, here in Beijing, I spend a good deal of time with a pained expression on my face doing mental arithmetic. The answer, by the way, is always the same: The item I want to buy is great value for money.

Thinking about all of this meticulous mathematics recently, I realized just how much I have grown to become like my dear departed grandfather. He was forever converting money into units he could understand.

My childhood in 1970s England was replete with instances of Gramps converting new ‘Decimal Money’ into ‘Old Money’ — the pounds, shillings and pence he grew up with. Old Money was replaced in 1971 with a far simpler system: 100 pence make one pound. The system my grandfather preferred was the one that had four farthings in a penny, 12 pennies in a shilling, five shillings in a crown and four crowns in a pound.

While it was always funny as a child to watch my grandfather convert new Decimal Money back to Old Money, my amusement went off the scale and edged toward incredulity one glorious fortnight when the whole family went on holiday to Yugoslavia.

We were there in the late 1980s when the dinar was suffering from hyperinflation that was reaching for the stratosphere. Back then, my grandmother held the purse strings and each time granddad wanted something he had to ask for money.

“Ten thousand?” she’d exclaim. “Ten thousand for a cup of tea?”

Then, my dad would tell them what 10,000 dinars was in English pounds – and my granddad would convert that back into his beloved Old Money.

“It’s less than a shilling,” he’d tell her.

“Oh, well, in that case … ”

It was a charade played out a dozen times a day and one I’m repeating today. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.