AROUND THE TEA TABLE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 174, 25 July 1928, Page 13

AROUND THE TEA TABLE

HATTERS OF GENERAL INTEREST.

(By "SHIRLEY.")

It is said that there are houses in England, the windows of which have, never been counted. Windsor Castle is one of these establishments. Windows won't much matter, however, either here or in England, if there comes in the idea of verandah houses, now being considered in Australia, in imitation of verandah hospitals. You just pull the walls in and out, as it were, when you want more light and air. In fact, the invention of window glass may be said to have been a doubtful blessing. Grace Darling, whose anniversary was remembered lately, would not have died of consumption only that she slept in her lighthouse with the windows closed, as was proper at the time. These constant demands for the new house remind us that the house really is in a transition stage, in the melting pot as it were. Up till lately, all the rooms of people, either rich or poor, were cumbrous and dustcatching. The bachelor girl of that time saw her bed-sitting-room run down to chaos daring the busy week, raising it to the heights of order again on her Saturday off, to watch it running down once more. Now she has sometimes the new apartment, to which she can say of a morning, "Bye, bye, little room, be good"—and she returns to find it just as dainty and smiling as when she left. It has kept itself to itself, its varnish and hygienic walls with not a stain or a shadow of sinful dust upon them. Some people, by the way, are advocating the same kind of wall-paper throughout. But, think of the shock, when you encounter gamboge in the front passage, and have not, for a few minutes at least, the glorious hope that something better will be found later on, though usually it is something worse. The argument is that the same wall treatment throughout makes the house look larger. But who wants her house to look larger. She wants it to be larger. * * • • The father who complains that he can never get a good cup of tea these days, and wishes he were back making billy tea over the camp fire, is going to get hiß sorrow taken away from him. For he will be able to make his own, indeed, with a certain new invention, it will be quite orthodox for him so to do. A cup has been invented with a tube down near the handle for the tea, and by a little manipulation father can brew his tea, and also stop it brewing, if he doesn't forget owing to arguing about the degeneracy of modern housewives. Will this idea catch on? Somehow I doubt it. We have had, and still have, tea infusers, but they are for the solitary, not' the sociable. I think we shall always keep to the teapot, whether of the stately silver kind or that other that tells us in gold lettering round its ample waist to "Have a cup of tea." * * • * A New Zealand woman who has returned from America—we love it, but how we always return —states, a little surprisingly, that it is the easiest place in which to make money. The stuff is simply in the air, and you catch it. Unfortunately you catch double pneumonia also, and the doctor finds his also in the air. For, you see, you cannot go out of heated rooms into the air without some little reminder of that sort. And you are always going out into the air, for most of the eating is done out of doors. Yet even the idea of heating the streets is being considered by the authorities of that country. From another source, "Time and Tide," to wit, there comes news that in Nevada they are attempting to steam heat a road. Think of the comfort, girls, for unprotected ankles, if our Town Council could think out something like that. But would it benefit us so very much? We have given up walking mostly. We resemble Mabel, whose sad story is told somewhere (in the language of those Victorian ditties, which tell how the Mabels of those days, when good, were promised a walk for a treat). In his new car papa with pride, Took daughter Mabel for a ride, And so, in gay and thoughtless fun. Her shocking habit was begun. Mabel, in fact, refused to walk at all. She refused to walk until, through stiffness of unexercised joints, she lost the ability for self propulsion. The parents, however, though grieved at heart, still had a use for Mabel— "I saw them last en route for Ascot, With poor Mabel for a mascot."

My Aunt Maria has a splexidjd idea for getting work for the unemployed. She says: "One can always get money for a war, you know. Well, let the authorities pretend a big war's on, get a lot of money out of people, a few millions, and then, when they've grabbed it" (her eyes gleamed at the idea of grabbing money) "spend it on roads and things ..." I didn't encourage any hope from this reversal of Pollyanna's glad game, though having to negotiate a road last Sunday in an Auckland suburb by means of a borrowed plank, I almost wished that these powers that be could give us this bad fright.