OLD YEAR DIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 5

OLD YEAR DIES.

CITY REVELRY. HILARIOUS CROWDS IN STREETS. HARMLESS FROLICS. Despite rain and muggy heat, Aucklanders bade farewell to 1936 and welcomed 1937 on Thursday night with, it seemed, even more hilarious revelry than Hogmanay usually inspires. Although they spent in the city this Christmas thousands of pounds more tha.n they did 12 months ago, Aucklanders appeared still to have sufficient of "the necessary" for them to indulge freely in the harmless follies' proper to the occasion. In the suburbs, there were parties at so many homes that one wondered whence the guests came, the more so when one reached Queen Street and found the crowd thronging there. But it was no night for speculations after the style >f Malthus; it was a night for folly and mirth and noise, madcap practical jokes and loud horseplay. In Queen Street the crowd revelled in the few hours' licence that is their's by right of ancient custom, and is more than ever appreciated in these days when legislatures commonly write into the Statute Books in one year more "tliou shalt nots" than even Moses was able to think up in an uncommonly long life-time. Dozens of such petty restrictions were joyfully overstepped, just for the fun of liam.iess law-breaking, while the tall helineted fellows whose dutv it is to enforce them—well, they, "like good chaps, were content, so long as the fun was not carried too far, to look the other way. Queen Street Revels. All sorts of weird devices for raising a din were pressed into service, providing a fitting accompaniment to the lighthearted ribaldry that was bandied about amongst the younger revellers, as they strolled, ran, danced or staggered, according to their inclination and ability, up and down the thoroughfare, made* love openly and unashamed under the bright lights (in this the bluejackets ashore on leave set the standard for dash and success). As the minute hand of the clock, reaching 12, gave the old year its death blow, the new year was welcomed with a din of whistles, hooters, tin can drums, and fireworks, cheers, yells, shrieks, adn the first verse of "Auld Lang Syne." In the suburbs, at the same time,* the skirl of the pipes was heard as Scots folk, having toasted themselves and one another, set out to "first foot" their friends and sample their friends' cakes and whisky. New Tear Resolutions. And at the same time, no doubt, scores of earnest young folk were solemnly affirming their New Year resolutions. After the chiming of midnight, the crowd began to thin, and the noise of trv.mpets and voices lessened, and the rain came down and a dearth of means of transport was discovered. The last outward-bound tra-mcars, buses and trains, filled to overflowing, still left in the city many folk in whom reaction was following close upon excitement; folk who had thrown away their paper bugles they had been blowing, and the grotesque masks and absurd hats they had been wearing, and were becoming painfully aware of tired feet and sore throats. Wistful and woebegone, they gathered at the vacant taxi-stands, and doubted whether, after all, their gaiety had really been spontaneous, or whether it was only like the whistling of a small boy going through a graveyard by night—an attempt to banish the terrifying thought that this night a grim skeleton hand had turned over a new leaf in the calendar of the centuries, that what was written on the page just filled could be neither amended nor expunged, and that the same hand might on this new page, write "finis" to the account of any one of them.