RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30312, 12 December 1963, Page 32

RANDOM REMINDER

THE PIPES OF PAN

There is nothing quite like a warm, unhurried bath to start the day well. There are some who extol the virtues of the shower, all the jiggling about, and the one-man soap operatics: but it is only in a bath that a man content with himself really has time to appreciate all his own virtues. The long, lazy bath ranks high in the better things of life. ! And that is why we feel the very deepest sympathy for the Heathcote man called from his bath i one morning recently by a wild and despairing shriek from his wife. When she had finished. t he could hear the wild and despairing shrieks of his 10-year-old daughter. It was clear that some (crisis had occurred. And it had. A large goat had

entered the property, had approached the veranda and had baled up the little girl in a comer. There was no time for modesty. The man leaped from the bath and raced outside. His wife, peering anxiously round the door, from the inside, let him out—then slammed it, to make sure the goat did not enter. The man seized the goat by the horns, and discovered that as well as being a large goat, it was a very strong goat Which did not like being held by the horns. Yet he felt compelled to hang on to them, because he thought that if he released them, the goat might take it into his mind to apply his horns to the man's unprotected person. It was a fairly even struggle and there is no

way of knowing, for certain, whether the man pushed the goat down the path, or the goat dragged him there. The conflict rather broke the still silence of the morning air: the stertorous breathing of both contestants sounded like a vintage car rally. But at length it was all over, and the gate separated them. It would not have been so bad had the goat stayed there, looking angry and butting at the gate like an All Black in a ruck. A curious neighbour, chancing on the scene, might have realised, if he was quickwitted, what had happened. But without the goat, the stage was alarmingly empty for the man. Especially when he trinped, in his haste to find sanctuary inside, and fell. Some people just don’t understand.