SENSE AND NONSENSE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 73, Issue 115, 17 May 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

SENSE AND NONSENSE

RANDOM REFLECTIONS OF A LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER

(By Robert Magill in Sunday Pictorial) I have come to the conclusion that what is the matter with this country ia the modern girl. There is not enough of her. What I mean is that when she was fatter she needed more material for her clothing; she wore out more boots; and all of these things created work- And also, she ate more bread. Hence the latest slogan: *‘Eat more bread” and help the farmers, the millers and the bakers. At present the only use to which she puts bread is to pnsh pieces of other food on to her fork. Bread as a food is nearly as old as the apple, and the making of it is probably the most ancient human art. The calcined remains of several slices dating from the Stone Age have been discovered in Switzerland, although most of this stuff has been used up recently to make the sandwiches they give you when you want to buy a drink after hours. The Egyptians kneaded the dough with their feet, which was the invention of the fox-trot, and the Greeks baked fifty different varieties. The statue which we erroneously assume to bo that of a discus thrower is probably that of a man attempting to deal with a refractory muffin. The Turks, in later years, had a playful habit of nailing to their shop doors the ears of bakers who adulterated bread, but then they had to do something with ears before wireless was invented, anyway.

Bread is the Staff of Life, and in all ages people have been represented as crying for bread, although personally I think they would have shown more sense if they had cried for toast, especially with plenty of butter and half an inch of anchovy paste on it.

But at the same time there is no need to eat bread if you prefer cake. Xou can put it to a number of uses. In certain night clubs the rolls are regarded purely as part of the general hilarity, and many a man who sauntered round Hell Fire Corner and swanked he wasn’t afraid has quailed before a crusty one aimed at him by a muscular chorus girl. Bread is the main ingredient of the hot dog which is sold to football spectators to gag them when they become too vociferous- A handful of bread packed into the gear-box of a 1914 car will make it run as silently as a next year’s supercar, as every motor salesman knows. And finally, you can use bread to clean the finger-marks off your income tax form after you have spent a week falsifying it. What should we do without bread? Making Golf History

Golf bears about the same relation ♦o a real sport as Patience does to Bridge. It is an absurdly easy game, but this very fact makes it all the more exacting, because you are not trying to beat a human opponent. Your adversary is your own natural incapacityProbably the most diabolical form of tviture in this so-called pastime is the putt, because so much hangs on it. You can atone for a pulled drive by a goed iion shot, but an inch too far one way on the green costs you a stroke just as much as a three-hundred yard slosh that lands in the neighbouring ailoinscnts. , Wc have an old sea-dog in our club who suffers from a putting complexHe has tried all the gadgets out of ■which our pro is making enough to buy a hotel, and still, if the hole were twentv feet across, and his ball six

inches from it, he would make it run right round the edge like a dirt track racer.

It is sucn a ghastly business watching him chivvy balls in different directions all over the green that few people have the nerve to play with him.

Yet he tells the story of how he once achieved a twenty-five yard putt. It appears that in the year IS9O he

was ship-wrecked on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, and whether you believe it or not, all he landed with was a putter and a golf ball. Luckily he had no fear of starving, because the island was crowded with bread-

fruit trees, and egg-plants, and for all I know cheese bushes and bacon trees as well.

After breakfast he went exploring, and came across the most magnificent expanse (>i lawn he had ever seen. It was dead flat, and the blades of grass were so close, and so equal in height that, they would have made a billiard table look like a storm at sea.

There being nothing else to do, he thought he might as well try to improve h?p putting, which was rotten even in those days, so he dug a hole. Then, probably because the bread-fruit was a little too fruity, and had got up into his head, he started with the ball about twenty-five yards away.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to distract his attention, nor a ship on the sea, nor even a worm to sneeze, so after measuring the lino, and concentrating for half an hour, he raised his club, breathed a silent prayer, and struck the ball-

And, as usual, it started travelling sideways just fast enough to move six inches before it stopped. But suddenly, so he says, the whole island tipped up on one end, and began revolving. The ball ran hither and thither, and to and fro, forward and reverse, and all sorts of places—and finally it dropped into the hole.

Five minutes later the island disappeared under the waves, and the old man was swimming for his life. I forget how he got saved, or why, but until we have another earthquake he will never hole another puttNobody Likes the Expert

Whatever is worth doing is not always worth doing well. For instance, there is bridge. The average player is usually envious of the expert, but the ijact is that the latter never gets any fun out of the game at all. He knows exactly what any hand is worth, and the probabilities of the other hands to a decimal part of a trump. As soon as the first card is played, he knows hew many tricks he can make, and you might as well throw the hands in.

It is about as sporting a proceeding as adding up your debts at the end of the month and calculating how far \ will go towards them. Now with me it is different. I am i .. i .. . piayer. That is to say, that I never revoke, or hardly ever. I always return my partner’s lead unless I forget. I never call on four to the ten unless there is some good reason for it, such as that I am fed up with bolding rotten cards, and I want to play a hand. Thus every baud to me is a sheer adventure. 1 can tell if it is a good one by the number of pictures in it, but I haven’t the faintest idea whether I shall make a grand slam, or go six down- I’ve forgotten what the other players called. I get a thrill when I take a trick with the queen. The expert would have remembered that the ace and king had been played, but I never noticed

them. Besides, he would deduced, my dear Watson, that the queen would be trumped, and wouldn’t have played it. If I get the one club I called I am as proud as though I’d fetched home a sackful of Golden Fleeces- I can get enough emotion over playing one hand to fill up a back-stage talkie film, and then slop over. Another point is that although people admire the expert, he seldom gets asked round a second time. Myself I feel that a man who can calculate well enough to get game on a hand on which I should have gone ingloriously down is too clever by half. He may be inside the law, but he comes perilously near to being a cardsharper. I know people affect to sneer at the man who suddenly says, “Oh, arc those trumps?” When he throws away the only card of re-entry in dummy, his prtner looks at him as though he was an argument in favour of race limitation. But at the same time we really like playing with him. He makes us feel almost highbrow in comparison. We can patronise him. And it’s worth while losing a few tricks to get the opportunity of bullying the poor simp.