LONDON’S NEW YEAR

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 126, 25 February 1928, Page 25

LONDON’S NEW YEAR

A BAD BEGINNING (Dominion Special Service.) (By Nellie M. Scanlan.) Loudon, January 2, 1928 London spent New Year licking its wounds. I’oor old London 1 ft still talks of the bruises of Ice Wednesday; Christmas with its tragedy and comedy of snow, and New Year with its fatal thaw and floods. Many were glad to see the last of 1927 a 5 ear of little sunshine and few achievements; 1928 swept in with a muddy tide, barges running amok on the 1 hames, villages afloat, and, worst of all, tile winter sales knee deep in mud. Just imagine itl New Year’s Day is not a holiday in England. In Scotland and France, yes, but in England no, emphatically no. Here New Year's Day is memorable for one thing only the beginning of the winter sales. ’ Think of the Australian and New Zealand workman toiling on New Year’s Day. No race meetings, no regatta, no sports tournament, no surfing. Just a grim, grey day of labour to begin the New Year. The Magistrate’s Court full of black eyes, the melting ponds peppered with lialf-drowned skaters, the railways crowded with half-price travellers, for the obliging railways reduce fares for the London sales.

Jhis wonderful old London, where women still wear hatpins and grapes are •- s - (id. a lb.! I sat at luiieh beside two black knobbed hatpins, the old two-a-penny type. I wanted to pat their shiny bead heads, they were like old friends out of the past. The grapes, great luscious out-of-season clusters, were nestling beside pink-cheeked peaches, haughty foreign aristocrats wearing the exclusive label “3s. Gd. each.’’

In the great shops women were tossing bargains like a juggler tosses balls. Silk stockings were straddling the air, in their flight of inspection; silk remnants rose and fell in a soft rustling whisper. London was celebrating its great New Year carnival with an orgv of buying. Good resolutions were trampled underfoot, buried deep in the mud. Thrift and temptation fought many a duel, but the wise went in for the wool. I'ur

coats were up tor slaughter, but the real victims, in most varieties, had cmei nibbled grass in our own sunny clime.