ALL MODERN INCONVENIENCES

NZ Truth, Issue 1202, 13 December 1928, Page 21

ALL MODERN INCONVENIENCES

LEND me your ear, PIXIE, and any ready cash which you may possess. To flat or not to flat, that is the question? No, light of the north, I haven't been and joined the Wellington Harmonic Society. I'm house-hunting — or, anyhow, hunting for a place where I can. deposit my weary old bones and (if I want to) swing a decent-sized cat m perfect comfort for all save the cat. The trouble is, one little flat looks to me so very much like another little flat. I'd hate to think I was bathing, dressing and frying sausages m precisely the same surroundings as the Female Next Door, and probably under the auspices of the same sort of waJlpaper. I want my : house to look like myself. ("Lor'," says you promptly, bursting into some such low ditty as "That Tumbledown Shack m Athlone.") But you'll know what I mean — if anything. One of the French bookmen that we loved m our misguided youth has a poem about old houses m which he says that they grow old and wise like the families that live m them— absorb all the color laughter and dreams, April and December sweetness. , Perhaps it's true. But you can't imagine a flat rising to such poetio heights. The dens we- live m to-day can't grow old, m the decent sense of age. They just gei shabby; like ladies who drink g!n. ' I want a house, big white one, with towers on top, green lawns spread out m front, and forget-me-nots done up m parcels. The sort of place where one can have a big swing m the garden, x beneath a pine tree, and little walks hidden among hydrangea bushes and, spidery summerhouses. All the artistic accompaniments of the perfectly lazy life. Souviens-toi? The. ideal house of our childhood used to have at least one secref passage, and a smugglers' cave within reasonable distance and pines so thick that trespassers were really prohibited, all except the smallest and wriggliest boys, whom we wouldn't have minded anyhow. People passing by would just see a little blue curl of smoke rising from red tiles, like the eagle feather m a huntsman's cap. 'To come back to the point . « . what about that ready cash?. —Needfully, as ever, TAFFY.' . .