Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1946 FLOURY FANTASIA

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 66, 23 December 1946, Page 4

Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1946 FLOURY FANTASIA

FAIRY tales are popular at Christmas time. The best one of the festive season so far comes from Wellington. It is about flour, wholemeal flour, which is required urgently byWellington bakers for those who for health’s sake eat brown or wholemeal bread. The merry millers of the south were anxious to ship this flour to the hungry metropolis, so they placed it on the fast ferry steamer. And on Monday morning that flour had reached Wellington for the fifth time without being unloaded. Perhaps even then it was not delivered because the merry millers and the anxious bakers have lost heart; they believe the waterside gremlins just won’t let the flour leave the ship. There are other fairy stories too, about the potatoes that are going mouldy because they have been in a ship’s hold for three weeks, about the new export trade New Zealand hoped to inaugurate with the Far East, about the British food ships silent and anchored in Auckland harbour, about the chocolates and biscuits and beer that are not arriving, and about the watersiders’ wives and children who will be on short measure this Christmas. The sour old sceptics don’t believe in fairy stories; they say it just can’t happen here. After all, they declare, this is the year 1946 when people know that co-operation is essential if we are all to get along together. This is a commonsense, realistic world, they say, where there are no such things as fairy tales. Silly stories like that were believed only in the dark old ages, they declare.