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Press, 9 July 1983, Page 24

Random reminder

BATTLE WITH THE BOTTLE

A syndrome is a group of symptoms which occur together and which have a common label. One such is the “Some Enchanted Evening” syndrome, which starts with visual impressions of an unfamiliar phenotype across a crowded room. You fly to their side. You see their spasmodic risibilification. And night after night, as strange as it seems, the sound of their laughter will ring in your dreams. Especially if you have married them, which is the only known cure for the “Some Enchanted Evening” syndrome. Marriage, however, is not a reliable cure and in many many cases the symptoms persist “forever,” as human reckoning has it, or until one of you gets run over by a bus. Lovers therefore are warned to beware of buses. Buses at least can be guarded against by prudence and foresight. The “Some Enchanted Evening” syndrome can not. It is a fact of life (who can explain it, who can tell you why?) that when people do end up sharing sheets, showers, and the morning “Press,” it is always those who sleep with the windows warmly shut who end up with partners whose nightly habit it to fling wide the windows firmly open. Lovers of crunchy peanut butter who have never liked Mannite look up

from their toast to discover someone who is allergic to peanuts and who eats Marmite by the teaspoonful. The anguish of driving around town with incompatible bumper-stickers is great. The anguish of being seen in public with someone who shows much taste in clothes — all of it bad — is even greater. It is not easy, having a good time! One Richmond couple, struggling along from day to day, wondering all the time whether to jack in it and seek new partners with more income or more pattability, got a water-bed presented to them recently. A gang of local kids had chipped in to buy or to lift if off the back of a truck. The water-bed was a silver wedding present. Somehow they had hung in there for 25 years. Hence the kids. It became clear almost at once that there was going to be yet more trouble. The lady turned the temperature control up to “High” and left it there. Water-beds do not have dual heat controls. Waterbeds take three days to heat up or cool down. What was the gentleman to do? To help him get to sleep, to aid his Central Nervous System as it gently adapts to over-warm surroundings, he climbs into the hot water-bed with — as any lateral thinker should have guessed — a cold hot-water bottle.