A DOWNRIGHT CRITIC

Southland Times, Issue 22508, 16 February 1935, Page 11

A DOWNRIGHT CRITIC

In your saner moments wouldn’t you agree with this from Albert Joy Nocks’ “A Journal of These Days” (Heinemann) :

9 May.—Portuguese cooks do great things with salt codfish; I hear they nave twenty ways of cooking it, and all good. Certainly all I have had has been very good. Their codfish is the fine, old, rank kind that we used to have, but now never; sold whole, skin, bones, salt, dirt and all. I suppose it will disappear as the country becomes "civilized.” and the next generation will buy theirs flaked or fluffed, done up in cellophane, and tasteless as cotton. I do not envy them this, or the wine they will probably drink, or the tobacco they will smoke, and I am glad to have come in for one more taste of food and drink that may be deucedly unsanitary and dead against the rules of diet, but has not been sophisticated by chemists for profiteers.

Nocks being sternly critical of his own country deserves his name: My own American acquaintance, for instance. is simply unmatchable in any other land I know of; I should like to name a couple of dozen among them to stand up as marks for other civilizations to shoot at, in point of character, culture, education, manners, everything that distinguishes the human being par excellence. But the point is that with us such persons are wholly ineffectual: they have no influence; or society does not at all take its tone from them, directly or indirectly; and in no other country is this the case, as far as I know. Elsewhere they may be to to some extent submerged, but not wholly, as with us.

But isn’t this “blast” applicable in its fundamentals to other parts of the Empire, New Zealand for instance?

It is really extraordinary, the infalUble instinct that Governments have for Pitching on the most beautiful places to defile with their obscene performances. Look at Newport, one of the most exquisitely sightly harbours on our coast—would one not know that the swine who manage our Navy would plant a station there? Mr Nocks is downright and his journal damned interesting.