The Inside Story

Northern Advocate, 3 June 1939, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Inside Story

by the, “PRIVATE D. ’’

MOTHING I know about myself is not known to the Government's tax assessors. Where now is the virtue of keeping a private diary for publication after death? For what now are a man’s secrets but tabulated facts in the file cabinet of the income tax department? I earn, and must record the earnings; I receive deductions, and must record them; I spend, and must know the amount; I save and must pay for the interest I receive; I give hours per week to keeping accounts so that I cannot be accused of defrauding the department. Those few hours are becoming more and more, so that the time is fast approaching when I shall require a secretary as well as wife. When such time comes, what untold demand there will for efficient wives. No longer will a good cook, a good dance partner, a good golf or tennis opponent, be the determining quality of a good wife, but a good book-, keeper and one who is not afraid of I telling the facts of private domesticity to a department of Stein-ian extract.

INTO my ear has been whispered a wise suggestion by one looking for a comfortable Government office. Why not, he says, place at the head of each street a Government official whose responsibility shall bo the keeping of returns from all in his thoroughfare and the checking of the details? Why not allocate an inspector for every hundred people or so, giving him the duty of seeing that all returns are to hand? His would be a handsome job, ascertaining how many chickens I have this year, how many next, when they died, how many relatives have overstayed and now become classified as lodgers, and so on and so forth.

AH, yes, I have no pride left now, I feel a hypocrite sitting down at night to pen my life’s diary, while tomorrow I shall unburden myself and my secrets on a blue printed form. I have lost self-pride, lost sense of propriety even, in this necessity for informing the Government of my antics. I feel like an ape, clothed in white collar, eating bread and butter instead of nuts, bound in by forms, dates, dotted lines, figures, numbered forms, in place of iron bars—but, like the ape, just there for show, for the amusement of other folks and the embarrassment of myself.

| THOUGHT my self-consciousness might be uncomfortable, but, strangely enough, I expose the nakedness of my finances without a blush to the blue form and, without the turn of a whisker, enter the number of cats, hens, dogs, cows, sheep, plum trees and struggling briar bushes as though

PRIVATE LIVES BARED ON STATE ALTAR*

I were well bred in such openness. When I think of Samuel Pepys and his terrifying experiences, keeping his famed diary from his wife's eagle gaze, I think of how times have changed, for there seems to-day no secret that a man can withhold both from his wife and from the income tax form. One, or other, will surely find out his roguishness. * * * *

SUGGESTIONS made by a member of a Northland county council that pedestrians on country roads should carry torches, leads the Private D to visualise the day when hikers will be controlled by strict laws and by-laws, not to mention regulations, schedules and specifications. The day when it will be mandatory at least for a pedestrian to wear a tail light must eventually come. Those of us who are short-sighted enough to wear spectacles are already equipped with head lamps, but even in moments of fiery passion the radiance which shines through our tortoiseshell wind screens would be insufficient to warn speeding motorists of our presence on the roads. A penetrating glance is not nearly as effective on a country road at night as it is across a bridge table. j

IJAVING to pay social security, and A income tax and registrations for motor cars, dogs, radio receiving stations, orchards, chickens and five bees, is bad enough without the prospect of being compelled to obtain a license before taking to the streets. To carry the suggestion of the county councillor a little further —and all great reforms spring from a little light—it seems that footsloggers, who, in the past, have been immune from the wrath of the Bulldozer King, will shortly have to go through the routine business of licensing themselves, obtaining certificates of fitness and receiving weight restrictions.

THE suggestion of limiting the loads which human beasts of burden may carry has already been introduced in the case of office boys and messengers. There is something to say for its extension to protect poor, inoffensive husbands who have been beguiled into accompanying their wives on shopping expeditions. Irrespective of size and staying power, even deprived of the opportunity of refuelling at some spiritous pump, they have been compelled for centuries to cart around loads, which have become dangerous to all within stumbling distance. Therefore, earless husbands, subject to home dictatorship, will sigh with re lief when a limiting lav/ is passed.

ft S a perspiring body, pedestrians ** should not object to the enforcement of speed restrictions, which could .be regulated something on these lines: Boulevards, when attended by member I of opposite sex, half a mile per hour; on conci'ete footpaths in boroughs, seven miles per hour; on goat tracks, similar to those expexfienced in some smaller hamlets, there would be no need for curtailment of strides, ex’cept where liability to paspalum gum makes plus foui’s, or even shorts, desix’able.

ABTAINING a certificate of fitness would involve a heavy drain upon the one-man power unit. No pedestrian is likely to pay 10/6 to the B.M.A. when a motorist gets off with

2/6 at a garage. Of course, if the benefit end of the Social Security Ensnarement was working, pedestrians would have the laugh over the motorist.

THERE is always a reason for the imposition of laws, good or bad. Now that motorists have voluntarily signed the pledge rather than the prison register, the number of drivers caught under the influence of concentrated spirits is rapidly dwindling. The well of revenue from this source is drying up and the Police Department may have to look for another spring. What could be a better goldmine than arrest-

ing pedestrians for being drunk in charge of themselves?