FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 905, 24 February 1930, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By

“THE LOOK-OUT MAN.”

TO THE 5 O’CLOCK HOOTER ' We’re never caught napping-, with ears all a-flappine-. We wait for tha.t h tr to arrive. Oil! here’s to the i. oter, the jolly old tooter, That ceases our labours at five. The keen piercing note that it sends from its throat May startle the bird on the wing. But it's “easy” and smokes for the likes of us blokes When the timekeeper pulls on the string. So down with the spade and the chattels of trade, Away with the ledger and pen. And home to our tea with a Sun on my Or around to the haunts of “say when,” For watches may falter- and fashions may alter And clocks may go wrong for a joke. But that steady old tooter, the five o’clock hooter, Will stand by the hard-working bloke. DICK WHITTINGTON. BLISTERING BREW One of those rugged mariners, a Thames bargee, has entered the day’s news through over-indulgence in a strange tipple called “red wine,” thus introduced for the first time to a wondering public. Red wine, it appears, is compounded of crude German potato spirit and a cheap Australian port, which is certainly handsome testimony to the virtues of any port in a storm. HARBOUR PLEASANTRIES Many are the delights of the vehicular ferry. One of them is that passengers may sit at ease in their cars, riding gently on cushioned seats and thus observing the pageant of shipping from a comfortable and convenient angle. The circumstances, however, are sometimes misleading. A motorist friend claims that recently a vehicular ferry boat was nearly involved in a collision; that a collision was, in fact, only averted by the nautical skill of the navigator. In the meantime, the passengers in the motor-cars watched the approaching vessel with interest. Strong 'men turned pale until the danger was over, or else swung hard on the steering wheels of their cars, at the same time tooting their horns vigorously. BOGEY WINS Champion golfers, like lesser folk, must bow to the dictates of circumstance, and the rabbit who dribbles round his home course in 120 or thereabouts will perhaps glean a perverted satisfaction from the plight of Messrs. Hagen and Kirkwood, condemned either to abandon their New Zealand trip or to stay on Motuihi and have practice which neither of them appears to need. Both of these gentlemen are very affluent people, and this is probably the first time for many years that anything so disconcerting has upset the smoothness of their programmes. The crack golfer these days deals in big figures. His income is thousands a year and he may ask with impunity as much as 10s a head from those who wish to see him play. In the circumstances it is a melancholy thought that for three weeks the fellow-passengers of Messrs. Hagen and Kirkwood may be watching them practise for nothing. THE ALL BLACKS In a degenerate day there are still a few places where tradition is held high. One of them is the Supreme Court. Barristers who enter there with a vestige of summer suiting peeping from beneath their sombre gown are liable to incur the displeasure of the Bench, which even on _ a sweltering day must preserve its dignity beneath wig and gown. There is reported to have been a local instance of this the other day. Sometimes the censured barristers retire in confusion, and sometimes they just blithely withdraw for a moment, and return with a black coat that is usually kept about the premises for stock use on just such an occasion. But the learned ‘‘all blacks” who stifle in wig and gown have at least the satisfaction that they do not do so in vain. The most aggressive moderns have to admit that British courts thus embellished have an atmosphere not duplicated in places where the sombre trappings have been dispensed with. DURBAN DUSTED

H.M.S. Durban, stationed in the Atlantic, has experienced what yachtsmen and launchsmen hereabouts call “a dusting.” Off the Bermudas the Durban ran into a storm, which swept waves over her forecastle and upper decks. This item in the cable news will perhaps recall to the complement of the Diomede, now in England, and the Dunedin, which is still at Samoa, the tossing those two cruisers suffered when they were searching the stormy Tasman for the lost airmen, Hood and Monerieff, over two years ago. The high speed at which both ships wore operating accentuated the effects of the storm, and waves continually swept the forecastle, while glass screens on the topmost bridge deck of the Diomede were broken. In such conditions the officers’ quarters at the stern of the ship were practically untenable on account of movement and vibration, and over 50 per cent, of the ship’s company were badly seasick!