EVERYDAY THINGS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 June 1938, Page 5

EVERYDAY THINGS

AN INTERESTING ANALYSIS. “What are you going to have?” .... "Can the City win away?” .... “Have a gasper.” When do you make these commonplace remarks—and how often? You have probably never thought about them, but the mass observers have, and they can tell you. In the Mass Observation pamphlet “First Year’s Work,” recently published, your smoking, drinking, and foot-ball-coupon-filling habits are set down and analysed (says Eric Bennett in the “Sunday Chronicle”). Half a dozen observers settled in a Lancashire cotton town (population 17,000), and watched and watched. Out of a potential pub-population of 60,000 adults there are about 20,000 pub-goers. Your average consumption of beer is three pints a day, but you don’t actually drink three pints a day. Real drinking starts on Friday night —pay night—and works up to a crescendo in the last hour of Saturday night. Between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. is the peak hour for the week’s drinking. There are more of you in the pubs then, but you turn out in pretty good force, at Sunday lunch time and Sunday evening. • » The speed of drinking also increases at the end of the week. Mass observers timed more than 1,000 glasses and found that you “knocked them back” more than twice as fast on Saturday night as on Monday. Slackest night of the week for publicans and slowest for drinkers is Wednesday. Thursday night is football pool night. Mass observers find that the football pool coupon has made Thursday the most important night in the week in many homes. Out of the whole population, including men, women, and children, about one in every three is a football coupon enthusiast.

One person in seven relies on a magic charm, two in seven rely upon some mystical “system,” two in seven just trust to luck .... and apparently the other two just fill ’em in. Out of a sample room of 60 people who have been doing football pools for three years, 85 per cent have won something. More than half of the smokers started as imitators. Fifty-six per cent of men smokers started smoking before they were 14 by sneaking quick whiffs. Out of every 100 men and women who start to smoke. 15 give it up entirely. Apparently 14 per cent of smokers pity non-smokers, but 28 per cent of non-smokers pity those who smoke. More than half of those who smoke cigarettes tap the cigeratte before lighting it. Half the tappers place the tapped end in their mouths, 21 per cent the untapped end. and the remainder don’t know which end.