SANDY'S CORNER

Wanganui Chronicle, 14 April 1949, Page 4

SANDY'S CORNER

EASTER WEDDINGS. Only six weddings in Wanganui this Faster. What has come over the show? Is it that Easter is slipping in popularity as a time for tying matrimonial knots, or is that this year Anzac Day provides a handy holiday week-end, too? ONE-TOPIC MEN. A retired English college headmaster has the Wanganui Rotary Club that he has been puzzled by the fa<<t that New Zealanders talk so much about horses, a sort of one-topic race, as it were. We are afraid that this headmaster hasn’t heard anything yet. We ourselves have seen business stand still while four leading lights of the community have discussed nothing else but how they drew shot on that hand against the wind, put kitty in the ditch when four of five down and played up shots, running shots, drives and put in blocks. We have heard a whole household, Dad. Mum and the kids, discuss why Kaierau got beaten and what they thought of the referee, the conversation lasting from the time they started to lay the table till they caught the tram to the pictures. We, too, have heard a whole family discuss horses from the time they .got up until they went to bed. And, looking back at those conversations, we wonder whether the lives of the people who indulged in them would have been better if they had read and understood Shakespeare. Maybe they would, and that it would be helnful to read, say, the “Merchant of Venice,” to smooth one’s nerves when looking back on a day when the “tote” has taken more than its pound of flesh. It is presumed that people discuss what appeals to them. That is why taxation. as a topic, is not lasting/ It is cursed!