LONDON’S NEW YEAR.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5245, 29 February 1928, Page 1

LONDON’S NEW YEAR.

A BAD BEGINNING.

TRAGEDY AND COMEDY.

London spent New Year licking its wounds. Poor old London ! It still talks of the bruises of Ice Wednesday; Christmas with its tragedy and comedy ot snow, and New Year with its fatal thaw and 1 floods; Many were glad to see the Last of 1927, a year of little sunshine and few achievements ; 1928 swept in with a muddy tide, barges running amok on the Thames, villages fjfloat, and, worst of all, the winter sales knee-deep in mud.

Just imagine it ! New Year’s Day is not a holiday in England. In Scotland and France, yes; but in no, emphatically no. Here New Year’s Day is memorable for one thirig 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 tourriament, no, surfing. Just a grim, grey day of labour to begin the -New Year.

The Magistrate’s Court full of black eyes, the melting pondfe peppered with half-drowned skaters, the railways crowded with half-price travellers, for the obliging railways reduce fares for the London sales.

This wonderful old London, where women still wear hatpins and grapes are 12s 6d a lb ! I sat at lunch 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-seasoh clusters, were nestling beside pinkclieeked peaches, haughty foreign aristocrats wearing the exclusive label “3s 6d! 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. Jjondon was celebrating its great New' Year carnival with an orgy of buying. Good resolutions were tramped underfoot, buried deep in the mud. Thrift an'd temptation fought many a duel, but -4;he wise went in for the wool. Fur coats were up for slaughter, but the real victims, in most varieties, had once nibbled grass in our own sunny clime.