AROUND THE TEA TABLE

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 12, 15 January 1929, Page 11

AROUND THE TEA TABLE

(By SHIRLEY.)

MATTERS OF GENERAL INTEREST.

"Mr. Kellow Citizen, is your home dark and gloomy? Do you sometimes look at the blank walls in front of you? If so, let us serve you. AH we ask is to serve. We know your trouble so well, and feel we can be of use. We wonder if you would like our little booklet 'Paint and Punk.' We should so love to send it to you. May we? We only want to lift the heavy burden a little!*" This is not a tract, or even a divorce agent's inquiry into domestic trouble. It is Stephen Leacock's idea (not much exaggerated) of how a trade approaches you when wanting to repaint and repaper your house.

We don't want those methods here. Still, do we err on the side of being casual? Some time ago, I wondered, in this column, why fruiterers, especially in holiday time, did not sell mixed bags of fruit, even as mixed biscuits and mixed lollies are sold. Xo doubt the first tradesman to think out mixing these two articles did quite well with the idea, and anyway they have mixed them ever since. Why not fruit? I do not want grocers or confectioners to advertise—"Let us make your picnics a little less gloomy. We only want to lift the heavy burden a little"—just to nix them, and say nothing about it. However, there seems to have been some celfconsciousness about it, and we still have to buy one fruit in pounds. An Australian lady now informs me that they have had the mixed fruit sales quite a time ii> Australia, only they arc in punnets not in bags. There they are, all ready an the counter, price small. What suits this Australian lady better, however, is the twopence worth of mixed vegetables which also can be purchased. "Twopence worth of soup vegetables" is your request. Probably -the price has risen a little by now, but the idea remains. •

Why should a lady bowler's dress be so strictly regulated? What the rules .in Xew Zealand may be I am uot, at the moment, certain, but in Victoria, as regards most of the clubs, the regulations are Draconian. Whatever the a~e or size of the lady—and the game allures those who want to reduce— white, or, at least, cream, is the rule. The stockings and shoes must be white, while, if some variety in the colour scheme is desired, a black hat may be worn instead of a white one. What is wrong with pale green ot a few pink spots, or even all black for the reducing ladies aforesaid, at least until they are reduced? Is it because men played bowls for so long, and men, as we know, must be sternly regulated, or thev will not advert to light colours? Men, in any case, would not patronise pale green or pink, so when they must keep mostly to white, women also must do so. Hard this embargo on colour at the very time when a new red has been discovered, which, it seems, will go even with auburn hair. Possibly, however, it will turn out to be the same old' colour, and it merely goes because we are all so much less bigoted about colours than in the older days. Colours go with each other in these'days which formerly allegedly "shrieked.""

Picture the shock to the little ones of a certain Australian town when they saw Father Christmas, red robes, cottonwool beard, basket of toys on back and all, led away by a hefty policeman— the one the synonym of benevolence, the other of despotism—and the latter triumphant. Father Christmas, it seems, had been caught keeping to himself the sixpences that should have gone elsewhere, and practical life, in the shape of a constable, invaded fairyland and took him off. Another illusion gone with the realisation that Santa Clauses, after all, are human, also amenable to the law and helpless. He didn't call Fairy Silverwand to his aid, or change the blasphemous constable into a large rat. He eimply shuffled off, and the children, awestruck, went on with their buying. The patriotic adults also had an illusion shattered when none of the toys seemed marked "Made in Australia."

t must say my feeling? were untouched by the story of the twenty-year-old girl refused a latch key by her father, the magistrate upholding the decision. Unless some queer, new law has crept in—and this is possible—she had nothinjr to do but pet up and quit, and the Women's Association need not have bothered to point out that she would presently have a vote, which is mure responsibility, perhaps, than a key. It is State guardianship rights that are complicated these days. I met a mother lately who complained that an official lady came every fortnight, complaining about the furniture. "Why let her in?" The house occupier did not know-. Then it turned out that her children were State wards, so she was obliged to on that count. She hadn't known it, or exactly how it happened, except there was a time she gave them up for a little to a home when she had to go to a hospital. She hasn't the haziest idea that she is no longer guardian of her children, and quite possibly never will have. She has got to the point of knowing that somehow she has to let the official lady in, but thinks it all ends there.