Let me stress that I appreciate the importance of metricating Guyana, if that is the right phrase. I know that it is vital for us to get in line with the rest of the world. I recognize the economic, business, educational and scientific advantages of doing so. I know that if we don’t “go metric,” then we will find ourselves the odd man out in the international family of trading nations. I appreciate that to be the eccentric outsider in this particular club means being condemned in the end to needless inefficiency. I know all these things and I urge their importance on anybody who may read this.
What follows, therefore, is simply a human cry of despair from one poor innumerate wretch who finds himself lost in the new terminologies, the scientific progress and the whole terrible onslaught of up-to-date technical jargon.
I was always bad at maths,and that no doubt accounts for a big part of the trouble. I have never been able to come near fathoming the square root of minus one, and those problems, so easily solved by 10-year olds, along the lines of “If six men in two days can eat one hundred and eighteen mangoes, how many mangoes can eighteen men eat in fifty-four days?” have always been completely beyond me. I have not felt too ashamed of this because over the years I’ve found many a kindred spirit – people, like myself, in whose minds numbers jumble and jostle intriguingly but seldom fall into orderly place or create beautiful patterns.
What has surprised me much more is to discover in myself an old-fashioned distaste for the new and the up-to-date. I tend to dignify this by claiming that I prefer the tried and the true to the fashionable and the flashy. But in my heart of hearts I know this is just an excuse for rejecting what my mind and imagination cannot become accustomed to. For instance, I am one of those who seriously objects, on purely literary grounds, to most of the modern efforts to bring out new translations of old classics. I recognise this as being merely weakness, the dull conservatism brought on by an aging mind and more slowly racing blood. I can no longer keep up with young thinking – or indeed young anything.
But I had not appreciated how far this had taken hold of me until it came to actually getting to grips with metrication and all the new ways of measuring things. Sadly, I find myself stubbornly unable to absorb the new. I lament the loss of the good old inch, the foot and the yard. How will they measure cricket pitches now? Will the glory of the mile-run race fade forever into history? Think of the marvellous treasure-house of phrases in the language now thrown out the window by the insistent demands of science? Shall we never say of Lear again “every inch a King”?
All this is bad enough. But what I now find even worse is that, unknown to me, the whole earth has secretly shifted beneath my feet and even the measurement of time and space has drastically changed.
Did you know, for instance, that as long ago as 1967 the second was re-defined by international agreement as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of electromagnetic radiation producing a specific absorption in caesium atoms? Well, if you did, I didn’t. I always thought that a second was the 60th part of a minute which was in turn the 60th part of one hour. All wrong, I’m afraid. What is worse is that my long-held ideas on speed are ridiculously out of date. The speed of light, I romantically thought, was the few hundred thousand miles a lovely flash of light takes to travel between moons or suns in a second. But that is an absurdly old-fashioned concept. You should know, if you don’t know already, that the US Bureau of Standards in 1972 re-defined the speed of light as 299,792,458 metres per second, give or take 1.2 metres on the slow side or the fast side.
We are living in a whole new universe and I know I should accept it. But I dread to try and re-calculate how tall I am or how long the sweet day lasts or what might be the bust and body measurements of that lovely young lady swaying down the road. All the old certainties have become a mystery.
It is not that I am unconvinced of the need to go metric. It is not that I am making no effort to understand. It is simply that the inexorable march of science has proved too inexorable for me. I think I can cope with the metres and the kilogrammes and even the hectares. But I am going to draw the line at telling the time by the electromagnetic radiations of a caesium clock, and I refuse to think of measuring the speed of moonlight by using a yellow laser beam oscillating at 520,000 gigahertz cycles per second. The whole thing is too much. I’m doing my very best, but I beg the Metrication Board not to insist that I change my whole vision of the universe – which for me God measures in a certain way without the aid of oscillating atomic crystal clocks or Krypton – 86 laser lamps as recognized by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
