LEISURE AND PLEASURE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 6 January 1936, Page 8

LEISURE AND PLEASURE

NEW WAYS OF AMUSEMENT

To-day there is nothing more significant’than the ease with which we can find amusement when we want it, observes -Mr Richard Buxton in a recent article. You can decide in the middle of dinner that it would be pleasant to spend the rest of the evening dancing, and, if you want to make up a party for the purpose, the telephone makes that possible, too. If you want to dance in your own house, and have a suitable floor, the gramophone will play for you or, with even less trouble to yourself, the 8.8. C. will do it. There remains one point of great importance to be observed. These new, easily obtained pleasures have not interfered with, certainly not ousted, the older pleasures which existed before they were thought of. Theatre, concert hall, opera house, all of them—though sometimes in fits of temperamental despair they may proclaim the contrary—are as prosperous as ever chey were, and it is worth while remarking that, in spite of running commentaries, the great sporting eveqts put up new records of attendance almost every year. The new pleasures, then, are an addition to, not a substitution for, the old. j What must we deduce from,that? Is it a sign that we are pleasure-mad and so rushing to destruction? Not entirely, 1 think. It is a confused sign that machines are at least beginning to do the work which alone can justify their existence. As much unemployment is technological in origin, so is our new leisure. Shorter hours of work have created a vacuum and into it these new ways of amusing ourselves have rushed. Not all of them perhaps are wholly admirable and we may be sure that not all of them will endure in their present form. But they are an earnest that the human race will liiul good ways of using its spare time when it has even more of it than it lias now—and it will have more when, with still improving machines, we improve our economic arrangements.