RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 290, 3 September 1931, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current

Events

LOCAL AND GENERAL

(By

Kickshaws.)

The latest Idea for the unemployed is to put them on the land. That will ie all right if they have one-way traffic; otherwise those coming off it will block the road.

A New Zealander, Just returned front Europe, says that we may have a growing number of foreign students coming here in the future if we go about it in the right way. After all, losing our own students on mountain tops is a first step In the right way.

It Is said that it is impossible to ascertain to whom complaints regarding the Petone Pipe Bridge should ba made. It has not taken long for officialdom in this Dominion to reach a pinnacle of elusiveness only attained la other countries after many centuries.

It has taken 200 searchers over three days to find a party of 16 who set out on Saturday to climb Ruapehu, but lost their way home owing to a blizzard. It is always easy to make suggestions about what is best to do when one is lost, but putting armchair suggestions into practice on ice-clad slopes or in thick bush is another thing. The trouble about getting lost is that nobody ever realises that they are lost until they have been hopelessly lost for hours. For example, the Ruapehu party were actually lost before they took the wrong turning. If It were possible to sit down calmly and decide that one was lost the subsequent work of search parties would be much easier. A lost person has always a feeling that safety lies around the corner—that they are not so far off the track as they actually are —although it would come as a shock to one’s vanity to be rescued a few hundred yards from home owing to a premature decision.

Those who have studied the problem of getting lost tell us that the best thing for a party to do when lost is to keep together in one place. Aimless walking is merely a waste of time. It uses up rapidly dwindling energy at an alarming rate. The possibilities of death from starvation, provided warm clothing is worn, Is sufficiently remote to be negligible for at least a week—provided energy is conserved. It has been shown that a human being can keep alive for periods longer than seven days without food. This has been proved In numerous Polar expeditions, in two comparatively recent mining disasters, and by innumerable hunger strikers. The latter, In fact, have remained alive for nearly two months without food. The first Job of a lost person Is, therefore, to conserve energy. His second Job is to find a good spot in which to be lost. It must be sheltered from the weather, but calculated to lie on a likely course for a rescue party to take. In thick, hilly country the tendency of man Is to travel near the bottoms of valleys. In flat country the tendency Is to travel along the higher routes even though they be only ts few feet higher.

By the time a lost person discovers that he is lost he may rest assured that he is well and truly lost. But when a waiting place is selected It takes some little self-restraint to remain there for days on end. There are little jobs that may be done to make the work of search parties easier. One may laugh at a woman who, having lost herself in the bush one mile from home, was found busily pinning pieces of paper on trees on either, side of her temporary camp. Blit she was certainly helping search parties. A “blaze” of some sort at right angles to the probable course of a search party increases their target many hundreds of yards. Indeed, some experts consider that a party which finds itself lost in bush country increases its chances of discovery hundreds of times if members, by day, are strung out into stationary skirmishing formation some 20 yards or more apart, depending on the country.

Now that Sir Hall Caine is dead it is revealed that It was his ambition to become an architect This same ambition was also shared by Thomas Hardy. In neither case was it realised. Writers may be born, not made, but it takes half a lifetime before many of them realise the fact. The number of cobbler writers and poets Is legion. Robert Bloomfield, the author of “The Farmer’s Boy,” was a cobbler. William Gifford, tho first editor of the “Quarterly Review” and author of those famous satirical poems “Baviad” and “Maeviad,” was a cobbler. Samuel Drew was a cobbler; Elihu Burritt was a cobbler turned blacksmith.

There can be scarcely a single author who has made a name for himself who started life as an author. Gilbert Frankau wag in the cigar trade. But for hard times in that trade and loss of business owing to the war, it is likely that he would be there still. Edgar Wallace laid the foundations of literary fame as a newspaper reporter, as also did Shaw, Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome and Kipling. It is common knowledge that Conrad was a seaman for over half his life, but few people know that H. G. Wells spent manyyears as a draper’s assistant. But for the fact that W. 8. Gilbert failed to secure an acquittal in his first brief It is not improbable that there would have been no Gilbert and Sullivan partnership. We have to thank his first and only client for giving him a hint. The woman, on hearing the Judge’s sentence, took off her boot and flung it at Sullivan. Tbe law seems to have been selected as their life work by several other famous novelists.

After starting life as a “bottle-boy” in a shoe factory, Dickens became a clerk in a lawyer’s office before his literary work made him famous. The medical profession has contributed such well-known authors as Sir Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, and at. least one Poet Laureate in the shape of the late Dr. Robert Bridges. In all three cases, far from being failures at their profession, all three had built up for themselves large practices. Indeed, if Somerset Maugham had not attained fame through writing, there can be little doubt that he would have become one of the foremost surgeons in England.

With far-flung beam it stands On rough and perilous lands, Warning with upraised hands The grey shipmasters; Why did no beacon free Flare out on lifejs broad sea To warn and presage me Q£ love’o dlMster?