This Freedom.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 October 1934, Page 14

This Freedom.

How scandalised our Victorian grandmothers would have been at some of the road fashions resulting from the heat wave! Some of us are old enough to remember when women went cycling in long skirts down to their ankles and big feathered hats of the coster type. And they were considered a little advanced for going in for that type of sport at all! During the week-end I saw a number of girls cycling down to Brighton, or other spots on the South Coast, actually wearing the bathing dresses in which they planned to have a dip. Towels were swung over the handlebars, and one could not help wondering what the effect of the blazing sun would be on bare backs, bare arms and bare legs. My companion was less cynically indulgent than I was He thought it was disgraceful. He declared that they ought to be caught and publicly smacked in the market place! Exit the Cocktail. Exponents of the old school of gastronomy rejoice and are exceedingly glad. The cocktail habit is slowly but perceptibly on the wane, and once it becomes definitely “not done,” we shall hear no more of cocktails even in suburban society. One bright spirit has defined the cocktail as « compliment to tea but an insult to dinner. Cocktail drinking, apart from its effect on the batting averages and the tennis finals, is an affront to real culinary art. it destroys the finer perceptions of the palate. Moreover, whilst cocktails go with jerky interjections, good wine stimulates genuine conversation. With the decline of the cocktail we may once more in London see a revival in intelligent talk. Over a bronx it is easy to address even an elderly and dignified person as “Old Bean.” Over the claret or the port no such outrage could ever suggest itself, even to the mind of onecylinder post-War youth.