Where to Rest on a Holiday

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 234, 22 December 1927, Page 8

Where to Rest on a Holiday

Is It Really Possible to “Take it Easy”? It is a queer tiling that, while most people go away to the seaside every year for what they call “a good rest,” the seaside is, generally speaking, about the last place iu which “a good rest” is procurable. I do not refer to the well-known practice of “overdoing it.” There are, after all, quite a lot of strong-minded men and women who can resist the temptation of tearing over the beach after balls, swarming up high cliffs and plunging about in that most exhausting of all elements, salt water.

But why these strong-minded men and women, who are intent on taking their ease, deliberately choose to visit places where it is almost impossible

to sit down without enduring acute physical torment, I have never been able to discover. Nowhere is it more difficult to make oneself comfortable than at the seaside. Take the beach itself. In theory it may be glorious to lie on the golden sand, but in practice everyone who has tried it knows it to be disagreeable in the extreme. Disagreeable to the back, disagreeable to the hips, disagreeable to the elbows. Disagreeable on sand, which gets in your shoes and down your neck. Doubly disagreeable on shingle, which leaves a pattern all over your skin. "NOWHERE TO GO” Too hot in the sun. Too bitter in the wind. And if, in the wind, you seek the shelter of some breakwater, that is worse than ever. Who would choose, for comfort, a cushion of unyielding wood, with whacking great nuts and bolts and rings of iron let into it at intervals, as into an instrument of torture? Alternatively, there are rocks. Quite a number of people, when they want to be luxuriously idle, elect to sit on rock. And then they wonder why they’re so tired and cross by lunchtime! Examine any holidaymaker after a week of this soi£ of thing, and you will find him a mass of lumps and scratches. On picnics, before settling down to your sandwiches in the leafy woods, you try to find what is hilariously called “a comfortable tree.” A mad quest, for Nature has decreed that the barks of trees shall be convex. Yet against these rigid convexities you premeditatedly set your back, murmuring: “This is ideal!” But it is ideal only for thirty.seconds. Believe me, the only way to enjoy a picnic is by travelling your own deck chair. Let your deck chair accompany you

everywhere. Plant it in the long grass, if you must have long grass. Set it up on top of the haystack, if you must have haystacks. It is the only remedy. But even so there will always remain the bed to which you have voluntarily travelled fifty or a hundred miles. The bed on which you cannot sleep because there is a mole in the mattress. Or, if not a mole,a geological museum. Perhaps, after all, the “restful holiday” is unattainable, and the wisest thing is to make the best of a bad job, rushing up and down all day, like a man in a Lear limercik.

Do you know that successful canning depends on the simple principle of sterilisation by heat? * * * This is why in all canning processes the food is subjected to a temperature which will kill germs. * * s Do you know that the food must not only be made sterile, but it must be kept so. * * s This is why in order to keep out germ-laden air, all cans and jars must be hermetically sealed. This is why only sound, fresh products should be canned.