BREAKING THE RECORD.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLVIII, Issue 86, 13 April 1927, Page 2 (Supplement)

BREAKING THE RECORD.

POSSIBLE FOR EVERY MAN MANY CHANCES YET GLAMOUR OF BEING UNIQUE (By Robert Magill,) We can all break records If only we are ingenious enough to think of the right thing. Captain Malcolm Campbell, who has succeeded in travelling at 175 miles per hour, is one of the first recordmakers for 1927, but, as a matter ol fact, so many years are in some way or another record years that the only genuine record year we can look forward to now is one during which no records will broken. For instance, in 1926 the highest score yet was made in first-class cricket; 115 policemen in London were bitten by dogs; the world’s records fo a mile swim and the half-mile running were beaten; Trafalgar Square was in eruption longer than Vesuvius has ever ! been; the Channel was swum so many times, and so fast, that all the sardines got giddy looking at the twinkling toes above them; a car travelled a mile faster than any car before; and .here were more motoring accidents than ever, including the one where I mistook a Rolls-Royce for a taxi one dark night. In themselves, of course, few records are of any use. Although some men can run a hundred yards in ten seconds, the rest of us still miss trains. It doesn’t cause me any pain to know that a man once hurled a discus 157 ft. The only discs I ever hurl are into a slot machine, and I don’t encourage witnesses at times like that. A horse once did a mile in lm. 335., but how does that help, if, as usual, you backed some other horse? Records Not Yet Beaten. There are still a few records we have not yet beaten. The record golf drive is 395yd5., although IJiavc good reason to believe that if I had had a tape measure handy one day I could have made that look ’like a putt. The official high jump is still 6ft Biin., although since they started selling motor-cars on the instalment plan people are beating this on the road every day. In any case, whatever we do oveT here, America somehow contrives to do it still more so. The Woolworth Building is so high that you can almost see the price of things from the top of it. There are more cases of drunkenness and more people are murdered there than anywhere else. There arc, however, a few figures we hold over here. Most authorities give the population of London as 7,476,168, whereas New York contains a mere 6,103,384 souls, admitting, for the sake of argument, the Americans have souls. These figures, of course, depend on whether one includes places like Yonkers and Hampstead Garden Suburb in the respective capitals. I believe Americans themselves claim that New York is bigger than London. That’s the worst of records. They give rise to arguments. Yet if we can’t be first, there is a melancholy satisfaction in being absolutely last. Beckett never had to take his share of the purse home in a sack, as 1 did Dempsey after his defeat, but he lost the shortest fight on recoid. "Chu Chin Chow" ran for 2,238 performances, but there was a play last March, called "Life Goes On," which followed its own advice to the extent of five nights.

New Fields To Conquer. But why try always to achieve the biggest, the deepest or tho fastest? Modern life becomes more and more intense. Crowds are bigger, sums of money larger and times shorter, but we can’t measure the main thing, which is happiness. Why not take the opposite tack and record the lowest high jump or the slowest mile? Think how wonderful it would be to read how a determined motorist on Pendine Sands had been travelling for a week, and hadn’t started his second hundred yards yet. Speed, height, cost and numbers mean so little, especially as in achieving them we teach those who come after us to beat them. • And yet there is some illogical strain in us that makes us strive to beat something, even if it happens that the only record we eau boat is one of our own making. With a little ingenuity one can see records in anything. The chairman of an insurance company once got up and admitted that there were no profits, u,nd no new business had been collected; "but," said he, "we are progressing. The number of blotting-pads wc gave away this year is easily a redid." Records I Still Hold. When you eventually get your deserts, you may be that policeman’s fivethousandth case. You mny use the shortest long cigarette-holder in the world. Even the Liberal Party will go down in history for forfeiting more deposits than ever before. It works the same way in personal matters. It may not hold any work! ’s records, but 1 have more demands for my rates then anybody else in this street. I cluim to have worn out, lost or otherwise hors-de-combated more fountain pens than anybody in this suburb, barring the insurance man, who lends Lhem to other people. But I have always been remarkable. T was not the heaviest baby ever born, but, according to my nurse, who ought to have known, I was the ugliest. Records are a matter of a point of view, but in spite of the criticism to which Major Segrave and Captain Campbell have been subjected, the desire to surpass the achievements of others is e healthy thing. What man has done man can do still better. When he ceases to do that he will revert back to%the protoplasmic globule. And at the end one can die happy, providing one can be the first victim on record of some newly discovered disease.