Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 106, 26 July 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Love and Mushrooms

Love must be so tired of hearing itself compared with so many and such widely differing things, from “heaven” to “hell,” a state of beatitude, and the world’s worst plague, but the latest announcement, culled from a musical play, is surely one of the strangest: “Love is like eating mushrooms. You don’t know whether it’s real, until it’s too late.’ The awful thing is that it’s true! It is too late, when you are tied in knots from having mistaken a faircomplexioned toadstool for a mushroom, to do anything but suffer, and

having mistaken the counterfeit, or toadstool, love for the real thing, one can do nothing but try to display the same fortitude over a heartache as over a pain in the tummy. At least, we are armoured with wisdom for “next time,” we reflect wryly. Are we, though? There is exactly the same trouble over identifying spurious love as spurious mushrooms. If we could go and gather the mushrooms in their natural sta(:e, from their native haunts, we might be able to detect the true from the false; and, in the same way, if we could but behold our “love,” unshaven and shorn, chasing the collar-stud, in his own surroundings, in the early morning, we should have an infallible test, but so often we only see love and mushrooms, dressed for the table, under the deceptive glamour of electric light, while the band plays “When it’s Twilight on Missouri.” In the glamorous and artificial light of the Carlritz you may be swallowing double doses of poisonous-stuff, but at the time it doesn’t seem to matter. Later when you’ve got a pain in either of the appropriate places, you wish you’d been more careful. The difficulty is that, though you may gather nuts in May and mushrooms in the dawn, provided you’ve got an alarm clock, it is considered “not quite nice” to visit young men before ten in the morning, which rather restricts one’s chances of following the old song’s advice: “If you want to chose a wife (or a husband). Choose her in the morning early.” The writer evidently knew a thing or two about men, women and mushrooms! I should suggest, if you want to find out if it really is love, or only a toadstool growth, you do any, or all, of the following: (1) Invite him to tea when you have got a really bad cold, a real streaming, “twenty-four lady’s hdkfs. this week” cold. ((2) Get him to take you to a matinee, drop the programme, your purse, handkerchief, pocket comb, chocolates, and lipstick in rotation, so that he spends the first act on his knees stinking matches, and then say, very sweetly, that you’re so sorry, but you think you must have left your new umbrella at the place where you had lunch, and if he wouldn’t mind . He could easily get there and back in the interval, and, of course, it’s not your fault when you remember that you never took it with you to-day, after all. (3) Go for a stormy boat trip This is a dual test, and much depends on who is the better sailor. (4) Take him with you when you’re hunting for a hat of that rather difficult green to match your new twopiece. If he is still waiting outside, after the fourteenth “I’ll just try here, I shan’t be a minute,” rest assured he loves you; he is a mushroom! If, on the other hand, when he bumps his head on the seat in front after retrieving your powder-pv r f, he should exclaim “Damn” instead of “I’d suffer anything for you,” or remarks, between your sniffs, that he can’t stand the smell of eucalyptus, and “What have you done to your nose?” he is a toadstool or poisonous fungus of the lowest kind! Bless you, my children.