The trouble about getting old is that one can easily lose touch with the young; we don’t always seem to be speaking the same language! For instance, I will freely admit that I have never listened to Radio One in my life and consequently had never even heard of a disc jockey called John Peel. So when a young lady told me, in a sorrowful voice, that ‘John Peel has died’, I wrongly imagined that this was some sort of catch or a juvenile joke, so I replied, ‘Well, he had probably just heard that the government propose to abolish hunting.’ The young lady looked at me in bewilderment. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ she asked. ‘Oh,’ said I, ‘D’ye ken him - with his hounds and his horn in the morning, and all that.’ The lady was even more bewildered. I had never heard of the disc jockey; she had never heard of the legendary huntsman.
    I know there is quite a time-gap between the two John Peels, but gaps can be found even within a lifetime. A schoolmaster friend told me that he was reading to his class a story set in the eighteenth century. I quote his own words:
    ‘At one point in the story a man wrote a letter with a quill pen and sprinkled the letter with sand. I broke off at this point to explain to the class that this sanding was a primitive form of blotting-paper. At the end of the story I invited questions and one hand went up. “Please sir, what’s blotting-paper?” Modern children with ball-point pens have no use for such a thing.’
    On another occasion a child asked me, ‘What programmes did you most enjoy on television when you were young?’ I found it difficult to explain that television had not been invented then, and even radio consisted only of a crystal set with headphones.
    Now, what I am leading up to is the undoubted fact that certain things in our masonic ritual will not be as clear to younger brethren as they are to us pensioners. And it is likely to get worse. For instance, metric units have now replaced our old familiar measurements - in fact I believe it is now actually illegal to sell things in pounds and ounces, pints or yards.
    So, how long will it still be possible to produce a twenty-four inch gauge? Nobody has yet suggested any alteration to the twenty-four hours in a day - but it is just possible to imagine some idiotic government decreeing that every day must have ten hours with a hundred minutes in each hour and a hundred seconds in each minute. I am sure that such idiots would dearly love to decree that every year should have a hundred days, but fortunately that is one of the things that no human being is capable of altering!
    However, feet and inches have already been outlawed in many places. Should we therefore alter our rituals accordingly? Thus, ‘three feet between north and south and five feet or more perpendicular’ would become ‘.9144m’ and ‘1.5240m’ respectively; ‘four inches or a handsbreadth’ becomes ‘10.16cm’ and so on - to say nothing of ‘the length of my cable-tow’.
    No, our ritual should not be changed to accommodate these metric variations, but we really ought to spend a bit more time in educating our candidates to understand the significance of the language in which it is written. That was the original purpose of a Lodge of Instruction, but in many cases this has become little more than a Lodge of Rehearsal, just ploughing through the ritual without attempting any explanation.
    There is so much that we take for granted without realising that our candidates might misunderstand. I was once asked by a young mason why we talked about ‘the principles and tenets of our profession’. ‘You can’t call masonry a profession,’ he argued, ‘We don’t do it for money.’ When I explained to him that the phrase merely means ‘the principles and tenets that we profess’, his reaction was ‘Oh, I wish they had taught me that at the L.O.I.’
    Other examples of change can be found in our working tools. Someone once asked ‘Why does the Junior Warden have a greenhouse thermometer hanging from his collar?’ Well, a plumb-rule does look rather like that at first glance; and the shape of the Senior Warden’s jewel is even more puzzling because modern levels consist of a single horizontal bar and a glass cylinder of liquid with a bubble in it: very different from the old weight hanging on a string. Like so much of masonry, our working tools date from the eighteenth century, which is why our Secretary’s jewel is still crossed quills and not ball-points.
    Please, therefore, instruct your brethren and encourage them to ask questions. Some of the questions you may not even be able to answer yourself, for we all need instruction, and the wisest of us does not know everything. Don’t alter the ritual or the established customs just because fashions and meanings change. I have heard the ‘Tyler’s toast’ altered from ‘over the face of earth and water’ to ‘and in the air’; - quite unnecessary because everyone who is over the face of earth or water must also be in the air to be able to breathe.
    Let us keep original words and explain their meaning in the Lodge of Instruction. It is never too late to learn. I, personally, have now learnt to distinguish between a recently deceased disc jockey and a huntsman of two hundred years ago ‘with his coat so gay’. And that last phrase includes a word that has completely changed its meaning within the last twenty years!