RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30535, 2 September 1964, Page 30

RANDOM REMINDER

TOOTH AND CLAW

Shifting house is a desperately unhappy business, even when one is young and relatively unencumbered by children and all their appurtenances. The assembling of one’s worldly goods into some sort of order, the organising of their packing and their dispatch and their receipt and unpacking at the other end can turn strong men grey overnight. A young coupie in our office arrived recently from the dreary north, having, they thought, worked out the mechanical details of shifting, fairly satisfactorily. They got

away all right, and after an interval, arrived at their new home in Christchurch, to find all the cases there ready for them. Excellent, they thought, rubbing their hands. They should have looked after their hands better, for very soon afterwards they were using them; there was nothing available to open the cases. They felt rather like Stephen Leacock's famous mariner who set off on his raft from the sinking ship (the one the pirates liad kicked a hole in by mistake) equipped with loads of tins of bully beef; only to dis-

cover that he did not have • tin opener. So it was with this young married couple. They fought and clawed at the cases, their tempers going, just ahead of the fingernails. They prised lids open by main force, sweated and heaved and broke boxes, using their boots with the fervour of All Blacks in a ruck. They knew they had set aside, up north, a crowbar and hammer to make the unpacking a simple operation. And they found the tools, ultimately, at the very bottom of the last and the largest of the cases.