CITY FINDS IT HARD TO WORK TO-DAY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18063, 25 January 1927, Page 9

CITY FINDS IT HARD TO WORK TO-DAY.

RUSH FOR BEACHES AND SWIMMING BATHS; ICE CREAM MEN BESIEGED. Hundreds flocked to the beaches. Hundreds throng-ed the river banks. Shop girls had lunch al fresco. Business men didn’t want any. Feminine Christchurch dressed itself in its flimsiest garb. Whew! It was hot! < hristchurch sweltered under the heat of a mid-summer sun, Christchurch ato ice-cream and quaffed soft stuff in quantities that on any other day would have been regarded as suicidal—Christchurch was hot, and Christchurch wanted to be cool. To work in an office with the temperature 79.7 degrees in the shade—that was the noon-day reading—was difficult, to keep one's mind from running to the surf—sun-bathing—tennis courts—and swimming baths called for

determination, and to restrain the temptation of sending the boy out for ice-cream, proved too much for the staffs in a thousand city offices. .Tt wasn’t a day for work. Hundreds of people realised that when they raised the bedroom blinds this morning, and from 9 a.m. until well past noon tram after tram, with lumbering trailers packed, clanged out of Cathedral Square with sweltering cargoes of humanity happy in the prospect of a dip in the surf. It was just one of those days when the message boy is inspired to tell his employer that he’d like to get off for his grand-mother’s funeral; it was just one of those days when ice-cream vendors smiled their broadest, when clerks wish that they had been carpenters and engine-drivers wonder what Hades is like.

Sumner, New Brighton, Pleasant Point—they all had their quota of picnickers to-day. thousands spent the day out of doors, and thousand of others would gladly have joined them had they been given the chance. Men sweltered under unkindly worsteds, tugged at tightly-fitting collars and cursed the convention that made necessary so many clothes, and the ladies, clad in diaphanous materials of a hundred different hues, cast furtive eyes at them and smiled. Poppy-likc parasols sprung up like mushrooms in the Square; there were red ones and blue ones, pink ones and green ones, parasols of every shade and tint, some bi-coloured, some tricoloured. some that would have reduced Joseph's coat to a monochrome they were gay, those parasols, but the ladies who carried them certainly looked cool.