THE COMMON ROUND.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20101, 18 May 1927, Page 2

THE COMMON ROUND.

By Wayfarer,

“The Little Cooks of the Empire” is surely an engaging slogan for this year’s Empire Day which falls a day Before next week’s Common Round. (By the way, I am hazy about the exact significance of the “slogan,” just as Mr Micawber, in convivial enjoyment ot “Auld Lang Syne,” was frankly hazy as to the meaning of “vvilly-waught.” But “slogan” is a convenient word, which has entrenched itself —dug itself in, so to say —in the popular vocabulary; and anyhow you will grasp my honourable intentions.) We have been told by cable that Lady Weigall, who wap once “Her Excellency” in South Australia, has struck in gold in a Kensington factory the first of a hundred thousand Empire Day medals for school children. These edifying emblems are decorated with the counterfeit presentments of the Prince of Wales, a visionary Bridge of Empire below a never-setting sun, with the lamps of Peace and Prosperity and the figures of Justice and Freedom..

So far, so good; but there’s pippins and cheese to follow. “Lady Weigall urged tho teaching of Empire economics to scholars and the revival of British cooking recipes. Her suggestion to award bars to the medal to girls qualifying as ‘little cooks of the Empire’ will probably be adopted.” That is the most engaging and at the same time most utilitarian idea that Imperial propagandist!! has mooted for many a day. It is immemorially and axiomatically true that woman manages man chiefly per the medium of his stomach; and there is not a male among us who dbes not know that defective cookery and consequent dyspepsia are tho parents of innumerable moral lapses. Human annals are replete with inhuman tragedies traceable to wellmeant ignorance in the kitchen. There is the typical instance of the hopeful youngster who might have lived to be Prime Minister, but who in a reckless moment ate the cake which a loving sister had concocted for his birthday. “And there’s a new face in Heaven, of a boy aged seven, who never smiled again.” Tne beneficent potentialities of Lady Wcigall’s movement are unbounded. The ‘Little Cooks of the Empire” may hold the destinies of civilisation in their deft hands and clever brains. The name reminds one pleasantly of another womanly company which on different lines has done notable philanthropic service—the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Did you over pamper your palate with the subtle deliciousness of a violet sandwich? The query, as thus put, is original on my part, and I flatter myself that it is rather intriguing. It has its origin, however, in two news items which recently caught my eye in glancing over a London journal. First, the present year marks the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of tho institution of the “sandwich, ’ which owes its name to the Earl of Sandwich, a gay nobleman who, disinclined to interrupt his gambling for a meal, ordered the waiter to bring him pieces ol meat between two slices of bread, so that he might cat while continuing his play. By the way, if such an obviously necessary contrivance as tho sandwich was really unknown prior to the year 1777, the fact bears poor testimony to the range of civilised inventiveness. The reputation of tho sandwich carries a chequered nature. Oh the one hand, it has the daintiest of savours and flavours, inviting almost poetic rapture; on the other hand, it is steeped in nightmares of infernal infamy. In tho course of an extensive pilgrimage I have mot sandwiches which made life worth living and foreshadowed the epicurean bliss of Elysium. But I have also languished in spiritual dejection and abdominal discomfort at tho counters of railway refreshment (sic) rooms, and cursed the malign memory of that too inventive Earl of Sandwich.

So much for sandwiches, qua sandwiches. You may perhaps suggest that we haven’t got much forrarder. No light has yet been shed upon my pretty notion of the violet sandwich. When shall I rid myself of the vice of discursiveness, which, like procrastination, is tho thief of time and space? Well, the second item of news in that London journal is to the effect that violets were used in the concoction of salad during this last English springtide. You now have the sappy germ of the sparkling; idea. Why should not the edible possibilities of the violet be exploited? It is winter now in New Zealand, but ‘‘when winter comes, can spring; be far behind?” _ A very few months more, and the violets will be raising; their heads, not in the ‘‘quiet Oxfordshire field-banks,” but in the pleasant gardens, public and private, of our own Dunedin. Then, what-bo for violet sandwiches and a fragrant, succulent observance of that hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary! Don’t be shocked by this eminently progressive thought. Don’t allow yourself to be hampered by blushing visions of poetic association". Don’t start quoting Shakespeare and Wordsworth and other visionary violet-lovers of that kidney. Take shares in the Violet Sandwich Company. We live in a materialist, sensibly prosaic age—the ago which takes its motto from Peter 8011. You remember Peter: " A primrose by the river’s brim, A yeilow primrose was to him, And it was nothing more." Nothing more, unless for purposes of salad and sandwich.

Centenary observances of actual people and events axe common, perhaps too common. In some instances the practice seems to be trivial and tiresome. But there is an interesting; novelty in the commemoration of an incident which never happened, or happened only in the imaginative brain of a- man of genius. What a splendid tribute to the worldwide vogue of Charles Dickens is conveyed in tho Pickwickian celebrations, which have been reported by cable! There is no doubt about tho date ; it is as accurate and secure as dates, can bo in the land of dreams. I look up my tattered Pickwick—the “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club,” to give tho exact title—and on the opening page I find the first recorded minute of the august fraternity, “May 12, 1827. Joseph Smiggers, Esq., P.V.P., M.P.C., presiding, tho following resolutions were unanimously agreed to’ . . and so on. And on the next day the pilgrimage started along that Kent road which, since Chaucer’s day, has been redolent of the choicest scent of English romance. Dickens himself was only 16 in the year 1827. Ho had not thought of Pickwick or of any of the wonderful creations that were to issue from h's soul. That May Tide date, May 13, 1827, was fictitiously and fancifully selected ; but now, after tho passage of a century, it preserves its shadowy and yet not unsubstantial place in tho hearts of the lovers of Merrie England. Tho revival of the old festivities can only be a weak imitation of the antique reality ; but it is good to know that the transmigrated or reincarnated spirits of Pickwick, Tupman, Winkle, Snodgrass, Weller (father and son), are busy in the land of their love! I know two or three veteran KcnMshvnon in Dunedin who must have thought yearningly of that Rochester pilgrimage. “And I not there! and I not there!”