AROUND THE TEA TABLE

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 239, 9 October 1928, Page 11

AROUND THE TEA TABLE

MATTERS OF GENERAL INTEREST. (By SHIRLEY.) Animal week will soon be round once more, including the one day when pets are brought to school. One wonders if there will be original touches, as on the last occasion. An Auckland child has had her eye on a conge nit ally blind cat, which, however, is otherwise not meriting a place on a feline register for defectives, being able to locate a piece of meat with great swiftness. However, all places being alike: to its serenity, it took to coiling up in the middle of a suburban road, causing all the motors to swerve aside, to the delight of the public. It has not been seen of late. Possibly it did this once too often. • • • • So we are having a mild potato famine. The Australian Housewives' Association would, boycott the offending vegetable. We can console ourselves only by remembering that in England during 1917 it cost 1/ a lb. Butter and eggs in that war period came to 10/ a lb. If we go short, we can console ourselves also by remembering that the men who w : on Agincourt never knew a potato, that printing, gunpowder, table forks, the . new learning, America, and so on, were, invented or discovered by those who never knew either "chipped" or "fried"—in other words, that the potato is by no means a necessity, in spite of the fact that it is the one vegetable which man, the unreasonable, will not do -without. If mother desires resentfully to boycott it for a time, her only resource will be to put a bowl of starch on the table, and observe that, according to food scientists, this comes to much the same thing. There are, I believe, two hundred ways of cooking potatoes, and never do we remember them so much as at present, when we want to let them stay in the shopkeeper's sack!

Talking of housekeeping, and the good old days generally, when women stayed at home, and houses were run so much better than now, someone has pointed out that, according to Shakespeare, households were really much more mismanaged than to-day. Take that nuisance of Verona, old Capulet, for instance. You remember how "he suddenly resolves to give a ball that very day, and sends out to invite the guests (who are not to mind such short notice) a servant who cannot read the names written on the list, so that if he hadn't met the house's enemy, Romeo, the wrong people might have come streaming in—"gate-crashing," as it is called to-day. Romeo, being an enemy, might well have arranged such a catastrophe. However, he merely elects to "gate-crash" himself, so for the whole trouble about Juliet, this impossible host was really responsible. Just before this hurriedly got-up affair, we see all the servants rushing about, calling out, "What ho!" and getting in one another's way, and this the swankiest establishment in Verona! Lady Capuletjdoesn't seem to have much to do with the matter, and evidently keeps retired from disgust. However, the guests all come fortunately, owing to Romeo, the right ones, but it is noticed that when the old bore asks them to stay to supper they all beat a retreat. Evidently they have been stung before. Not cast down by this fiasco, this intolerable person, just a few days later, rushes into another festivity (including a wedding), also got up at a moment's notice, the servants, who don't mind being kept up all night, rushing abo]ut and "What hoing" a* before. There doesn't seem the slightest reason for this festivity, except that one of the Capulets has just been murdered, but perhaps -that is quite a good one. Lady Capulet in this case does make some attempt to put the affair off "in order to get provisions," but Capulet isn't worrying about that. He says "he'll play the housewife," and we see him at three o'clock in the morning (according to the script) interfering with "good Angelica" about "the baked meats," which he doesn't really know anything about. Nothing in the drama, by the way, explains the original cause of quarrel between the Montagues and Capulets. As a rule, in those old Latin stories, there never is * reason. Two noble families just deeide that it is respectable to have a feud, even as Anglo-Saxon families less dashingly indulge in ghosts or traditions of the eldest son never inheriting. In this Shakespearean drama, however, I am quite certain there was a reason. The feud probably began with the Capulets long ago asking the Montagues to supper, and then, with their bad management, giving them the medieval equivalent to ptomaine poisoning. And, though Shakespeare does not explicitly say so, the moral of the play is that a woman should never allow her husband to interfere with the housekeeping, and that a man's place is not in the "pasty" (pantry) worrying the cook or dealing out "quinces," seeing he never can tell if they're blue mouldy or not, but somewhere quite out of the road, since if Capulet had been so kept from the very start, the whole affair of his daughter and Romeo would never have happened.