RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31290, 9 February 1967, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

MARINE OCCASION

There are times during the summer season when the office seems an oasis, a place of cloistered calm, infinitely preferable to the hurly-burly of holidaymaking. This is so, particularly, if you have taken your family to a seaside resort, and have spent several anxious hours arranging for the proper disposition of such minor effects as the children’s yacht. They appear to regard the vessel as the most important piece of equipment in transit, and lavish on it a care and attention often lacking in other, more ordinary pursuits. The feeling that there is real fun in the filing cabinet becomes stronger if one is aroused, In the

middle of the night, by a daughter who proclaims that the wind has got up and that the yacht’s mooring has been described by one of the local beach residents as being highly unsatisfactory. What is there for it but to feel about, bleary-eyed, for the Old Holiday Pants and to accompany the daughter to the water’s edge, and beyond. Out into the icy 2 a.m. water, out and out, chain after chain, to rescue a craft clearly In danger of becoming a minor Marie Celeste. Then to drag it back to safety, feeling like anything but Gulliver, and beaching it, and dragging it up high and dry, and finding ways and means of ensuring that it does not blow over.

So next day, when one has to go back to work and leave the family at it, there is an air almost of relief. You will again be among the people and the things you understand. And back home, getting ready for work is a distinct pleasure. There is a new suit to be worn, bought just before Christmas. Then the discovery that It’s not much use wearing only the coat. That the trousers, apparently, have been knocked off the hanger, that at the bottom of the wardrobe there is a pair of pants of very similar shade, but which turn out to be the Old Holiday Pants. That’s right: you’ve been wearing the new ones for marine rescue operations.