THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 226, 23 September 1932, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

Lord Inchcape, the colossus of the ekips, being dead, yet speaketh, and in a kindly voice. He has left to two hundred P. and 0. and 8.1. captains one hunTWO dred pounds each, and to SHIPOWNERS, two , hundred chief engi-

neers and chief officers fifty pounds a man. Celebrated accumulators are not invariably so mindful of the- people who did it for them, but there is the story of anotner well-known shipowner, who, by brains, industry and seamen, supreme and subordinate, rose, from obscurity to eminence and wealth. He was a canny chiel, of course, and much given to economies. Then he died, full of years and money. He directed that every man who had been in his employ for five years should receive a handsome sum of money. No man in his employ had been in his service for so long, and £.0 the heirs, administrators and assigns found his last testament uncomplicated and his estate all the easier to administer. He also, being dead, yet speaketh, and.a laugh went up from the Merchant Service. It knew.

The recent official juggle with street names, although it may confuse old hands for a decade or two, will serve very well until the heavenborn City Fathers of the DULCE DOMUM. future change them again. There is equal joy in changing "the name of one's abode. What could be nicer, for instance, than changing No. 13, Stepladder Avenue, to "The I<aurels"? You can understand the attitude of mind of the citizen who, believing he had settled down for good and all, called his villa " Atlas t," or the resident who had probably packed up his troubles in the old kitbag and designated his home "Waiwuri"—an excellent Maorifioation of charming advice. There is, too, a house called "Nutshell,"' but whether it is true that a caller knocked at the door and asked if the colonel was .in, one cannot say. There is musical license for " Lingalonga," whiijh comes trippingly from the tongue. Of course, these home names again remind one of the sweet little cottage "Concord" in a far 'South city. Paul and Virginia used to stand on the front step in public view each morning and kiss rapturously, Paul tearing 'himself away to work almost with tears, his farewell handkerchief fluttering good-byes in the breeze. Absolutely model couple, they were. The story touching it is too long, but neighbours ultimately noted the protracted absences of Paul and the apparent singleness of Virginia. The caee took up as much as three inches in the Presis. Decree nisi.

The persistency with which the Western world copies the notions common to the Chinese through the ages k. a great compliment to the inscrutable THE RETAINER. East. Sir Basil Blackett, president of the British Social Hygienic Council, recently said that many British people were paying their medical advisers a yearly fee, not only to attend them in illness, but to prevent them getting ill. Thie has been a Chinee© method since the Ming dynasty and before. Another quaint Eastern idea is "no cure, no pay"—ihardly a fair one. As an immense proportion of humanity is harbouring some complaint, obscure or evident, the retainer notion is a tip-top one. A penetrating person of the Nosey Parker school, listening to the chit-chat of hk fellow man and woman, must have noted that when two a>re gathered,together bodily ailments are more often the subject of discussion than .the weather. One unwittingly listened recently to a young man who recounted an intimate history of the family complaints with a special paragraph for himself and the lovely time he once had in hospital. The air was fiull of poisoned fingers, measles, neuritis, sciatica, with occasional references to "pewmonia" and "chewber colossus." He was mast interesting, Jiowever, about a lump he possessed. It used to be; a little lump about tjie size of a millet seed. It was much •bigger now, 'he proudly said, and it had moved about quite a bit. He explained accurately that cancer (he was evidently unaware that the dreaded name means ."crab"), was like the root of a tree. There were no roots about his lump, of course, but if ever he noticed any roots he'd "go to a quack." The idea that any doctor will poohpooh slight ailments keeps many shy souls from doing it now.

Suburban citizens commanding taps fed from Lake Pupuke on a recent morning looked into each other's eyes and solemnly asked: "What did you think "of A CUP OF—TEA. your tea (coffee or cocoa) this morning ?" The destruction of the natural taste of food and drink by modern science is, one understands, in the interests of health, so that those who aver that chlorinated water is nasty and •that they drank uncblorinated water for forty years without dying should be careful of. what ■they say. You never know wdien some authority or other will decide that death lurks in unchlorinated bacon and that an untreated leads but to the grave. It interests suburban grousem to declare that vegetables boiled in this hygienic water lose all their natural flavour, but as natural flavour seems to be dangerous one does so hope thfey will .bear their burdens with fortitude for the good of the race. If anybody comes to you and teJls you that the chlorinated damp may fill up the pipes, coat the kettles, spoil the" cabbage, and 60 forth, point out to him that plumbers need work and that this is an excellent way of supplying it. People go to Marienbad, Tβ Aroha, Bath, Heleaisville, Cheltenham, Roto--rua, Warmbad, Springfontein and other places thoroughly determined to drink nasty-tasting water when if they, but knew they could'save money and drink it in an Auckland suburb. Those, too, who aver that the morning bath in ultra-chlorinated water feels different to the water in which the forefathers of the race dipped occasionally for ten centuries, should be told that those old soula were an ignorant lot even though they produced super.-people like ourselves determined to destroy the flavours an interfering Providence thoughtlessly strewed around.

Stalwart British men in Britain itself are fighting ditch by ditch with urban authorities to be allowed to show their chests. While it is highly respectable THE BARE IDEA, for a woman to appear decollete in the evening, it is hig-hly reprehensible for a man to expose hig brisket in the daylight, unless, of course, he is a common navvy, or an underdog of that kind, don't you know. Recently at Hythe (tho place where the most expert rifle shots of the world teach young men heavily clad and without bare chests to kill their fellow man) the bathing authority recently emitted a piercing scream because a man bather was seen with a bare chest. The urban body forbade bare chest*. The bathere protested, so the unspeakable pietists compromised by permitting a, man bather to lower one shoulder strap of his "oos-sie," thus merely exposing onehalf of liis chest, the other being still screened in the interest of decency. At Hythe, therefore, and in neighbouring seaside places, it has now become the custom for men bathers to wear one strap undone for twenty minutes and to then retire to the bathing shed to adjust this etra,p and to undo the other to give the hitherto covered area a chance to get sunburnt. The troops which abound in the vicinity who are, of course, always clad' tip to the ears in stuffy <rarmen-ts, naturally regard these partially-indecent chests with ionging. One angry correspondent to a Hythe paper declares that if town councillors themselves washed occasionally, the sigiht of a bit of human skin wouldn't be so repellent to their pious eyes.