RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30395, 20 March 1964, Page 22

RANDOM REMINDER

FLASH-BACK

Most people are so concerned about their own troubles that they have little time to examine the problems of others. But we are not like that We like to probe, and ask questions, and get invited to stop interfering. But from time to time, others come to us and tell us of their dreary lives and daily difficulties. One such we met recently works in a sports store, and he said that there was one particular type of customer he had learned to abhor. . . . He strode into the shop confidently, a middle-aged man wearing a well-cut

suit and an air of mild prosperity. He wanted a cricket bat for his young son and he wanted a good one. But before a sale was even on the horizon, there was much talking to be done. About how longhandled bats were no good for the young ones, and what John Reid had said about something somewhere some time and he remembered the College match of *24 and so on, and all the while the man was making practice strokes of singularly poor quality all over the shop to the imminent danger of the rest of the stock. Of course it

could have been a football he was buying, with violent demonstration of how he had won the School match of '25 by running swiftly to his right on the half-way then propping and finging back a huge overhead pass to his full-back who dropped a goal from his own twenty-five. And what happens when the man gets home with his present? More reminisscence, advice, instruction, until the young recipient feels that cricket, or football, is worse than doing homework. If there's one good thing about sport, it keeps a man so young.