RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31090, 20 June 1966, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

PORTENTS

Only the announcement, tomorrow, in this column, of some news of quite shattering importance makes it necessary to mention today a topic which more properly should be discussed in the morning. We refer, of course, to the Shortest Day, which falls on the 21st although there is, as always, a dissentient group which claims it is on the 22nd—the same sort of thing happens at midsummer. Of course June 21 is only a sort of notional shortest day. and it takes weeks and weeks of frosts and southerliea before there is any

appreciable improvement in the weather. But it is certainly a turning point, a glimmer of hope ahead, a lantern in the window, seen through the storm, a beckoning hand, the other end of the rainbow, an incentive, a target, a reminder of warm days ahead, the smell of newmown grass, the merry laughter of little children . . . that should just about make the point It is remarkable, however, just what encouragement can be won from this turn of the year. It is not a matter of doing everything by numbers, of course, and starting imme-

diately on a course of cold showers. But at least when sitting by the fire at night it will now be possible to dream wonderful dreams of interminable mowings of lawns and back-breaking

dawn-to-dark days digging out immense trees of an even greater antiquity than yourself and re-planting them, at the whim of the little woman, three yards south-east of the original site; and painting the house; and putting down that new concrete path 55 yards long ... it’s all right. There’s weeks and weeks yet before the weather starts to improve and days get longer.