RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume C, Issue 29682, 28 November 1961, Page 26

RANDOM REMINDER

PICNIC However manv shoo- ball team for a week. after

nuwever many snapping days there may be left before Christmas — and there’s never enough—it should be remembered that there is more ahead than the bustle of packing presents and cooking. In the next two or three months, the picnic season will be at its horrid height. There is a very hard core of the community, consisting mainly of women, which, firmly believes picnics are the ultimate delight. They may, on a school day. find the cutting of three lunches an intolerable burden. But in preparing for a picnic, they fair’v shriek with delight at the prospect of packing up sufficient rations to feed a foot-

oaji team ror a weeK. They hum happily to themselves as they wade into the sliced loaves, no doubt drawing pretty mental pictures of a lazy day at the beach or a few hours in the shade beside a country stream. Nearly everyone else knows better. Picnics mean last-minute searches for sun-hats and cameras, swimming trunks, lotions and tennis balls, none of which have been sighted since the last similarly mad, gay occasion. Picnics also mean, invariably, the discovery after some 15 miles have been covered that something important, like the bottle opener has been left behind. Picnics certainly do not represent periods of rest. Parents at picnics are on the qui vive hour

arter hour, in case their children run dangers of drowning. or being gored by bulls, or falling over cliffs. Picnics are often marked by the discovery that the little boy next door, asked along at the last moment, does not care for any of the delicacies provided for lunch: not that he is really to blame, for picnic baskets are specially built to let in as much dust or sand as possible. And there is nothing, of course, to stir along the red corpuscles as a long ramble across rugged. North Canterbury tussockcovered hills, followed bv the discovery that the left back tyre is flat. Oh, well, it won’t be long before those lovely three-day southerly storms start keeping people happily indoors.