AROUND THE TEA TABLE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 197, 21 August 1929, Page 11

AROUND THE TEA TABLE.

MATTERS OF GENERAL INTEREST. (By SHIRLEY.) No, we can train the young mind as we like: —we can give it extracts from "David Copperiield" in the school journal, and also institute clubs to honour the novelist in a land of which perhaps he never once thought, let it is no use. A book by a new writer went the rounds of the elder members of a family— ! ' Just like Dickens" was the delighted comment —and then young hopeful was allowed to read it. ■'•Just like Dickens," he growled alter a chapter or two. "I jollv well think it just is!"' '« * * Why should dancing, modern dancing, associate itself so much with the spirit of selfishness. The sefishness seems not to be so much an accidental callousness as a sort of creed, and it The same creed were followed in all other avocations and pursuits of life, we would be back in the cave days. So it would seem, anyway, judging by the incident lately when a party of young persons, seven youths and seven girls, arranged to go to a particular dance, each being paired beforehand. All were intimate friends. The partner of one, at the last moment, could not appear at the hall, and his girl was allowed to sit partnerless all the evening, a good many hours of it. In another case, the partnerless girl bade a cheerful good-bye to her friends about eight o'clock or so and took her ballroom finery and her pleasant expectations back home to mother. This does not seem to be a deliberate unkindness —it seems just to be some kind of law among the young people, and, after all, it is their affair. But if the modern world were as monogamous in marriage as it is in the dance room, so many articles denouncing this era would not need to be written. •sr "K* * A Ph.D. degree for dishwashing—that is the latest. At least an authority tells us that "a young woman has just been awarded her Ph.D degree at the University of Chicago, her doctorate thesis being" a study on the time-honoured subject of dish-washing." The thesis, it seems, "contains a series of tables on just how many motions and how many minutes are required to conduct a dish soiled from the dinner table to the pantry shelf in a pristine condition." The writer regrets, however, that this "takes all the romance out of dish-washing." Needless to say, he is a man. . . He has pleasant remembrances of wiping up to various tunes such as "Massa's in de C'old, Cold Ground," which seems to have given him special pleasure. He states that once he formed a kitchen chain gang, that slung plates from one to the other with incredible rapidity, "only half a dozen being broken in the process.' 5 He advocates dish-washins as a pleasure in which we should invite our guests to participate, and indeed invite guests for that reason. '"The notion that visitors must never be allowed to suspect that there is a kitchen in the house is a highly erroneous one. Household chores," he asserts, "are never pleasantcr than when done in someone else's house. 4 ' Yes. the writer is most certainly a man. * * * * It is news to some of us that New Zealand trees were first commercially considered so long ago as during the war of the American Independence. Timber from Virginia was off the market, Virginia being then in process of turning itself into a foreign country. An Auckland lecturer recently read us an old newspaper extract, the diction somewhat surprisingly modern, in which the trade was advised to consider going for supplies to New Zealand, timbered to the water's edge, so that one scarcely needed to go on shore. However, the writer was rather out in the time then required to go to New Zealand, which he seemed to C think no great distance away, although he was "not afflicted with the idea that it was part of Australia. Since then, the assassination of trees has been recommended in the new land, yet in our own time there are exceptions. In Clermont (Queensland), some bottle ilrees have been honourably decorated, because, during a flood some years ago, they caught a house when it was being swept away, and held it faithfully until the danger was over, and the family was rescued. So now they proudly bear this plea to the passer-by: Woodman, spare those trees. Touch not a single bough. In the flood of 1916 they protected us, And we'll protect them now.

It is easy to get humour out of the working mother, but surely a little explanation would put things right. A medical inspector visited a school and reported that a small sufferer should have his adenoids removed. The mother was notified by the teacher, and later the child handed in a note. . . . "He isn't going to have no adnoids removed. I never had mine took out, and his dad never had. Some day they will be having a use for those adnoids, and be wanting to put them back. Let me hear no more of it and oblige, . . ." But if the poor woman did confuse adenoids with tonsils, how easy to explain to her that the first was a disease, which everyone didn't have by Divine ordinance, and for which therefore, there was no conceivable use. Scientific words are naturally a stumbling block to those who have merely done the world's work in its harder department, but the working mother_ is by no means so devoid of real scientific ideas as is so often imagined.