Osbert Sitwell, Poet, does so, on Patriotic Grounds

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 554, 5 January 1929, Page 22

Osbert Sitwell, Poet, does so, on Patriotic Grounds

cuse a bull fight in Spain. It is thus infinitely more degrading to the spectator. Cricket, golf and football are merely so many devices invented for wasting what is, as far as we know, the only span allotted to mankind in a world full of wonders; moreover, they are so tiring that the rest of the day, too, must be spent in a stupor. When you hear someone say. “After a hard day, I like to go to a theatre to be amused, not to be made to think,” that man is a game fiend. Such fatigue results from over-exer-cise, not from brain work. A healthy man can get more pleasure through the use of his brain than through the j use of his feet. The principal cause of the “gamehabit” is over-indulgence in food. People think that over-eating can be remedied by over-exercise. Once you take to it, violent exercise soon becomes a necessity.

But your health can only stand it while you are young. Such habits ensure a wasted life (for you have no time in which to think, and no energy with which to do it), and a speedy physical collapse as soon as you are too old to continue in such ways. Actually two brisk walks of from *2O minutes to half an hour each, or a 15minutes swim a day are quite sufficient to keep a man healthy in body. But there is also the mind. "Eat less ancl think more ” should be the slogan of all who have leisure. Yet games have a good side to them. A cricket course, a golf ground, a football pitch, act as temporary internment camps for all those who practise or are interested in the particular vice to which it is devoted. It is possible for the man, healthy in mind and body, to look at his watch on a summer day and say to himself, “It’s safe now, all the worst cricketers” (“wost” being used in the sense of being most given to a bad habit) “are at Lord’s or the Oval, all the worst golfers are on their ‘blasted heaths.’” (Shakespeare). “I can now r go out without fear of being bored by one of them.” Moreover, such games reduce the lifetime of the man who habitually plays them by a decade or two. For Nature very sensibly concludes that if men will of their own choice thus waste their time and energy the reason must be that this world does,, not interest them, and so removes them from it. R.I.P.