COMING ROUND THE BEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 730, 10 July 1953, Page 14

COMING ROUND THE BEND,

With

Denis

Glover

‘THE reason for the popularity of so : many bad novels is surely that so many people's lives are lived in terms of them. HAVE always been thoroughly in favour of capital punishment, and could only wish that by some legislative means it could be made to apply before and not after, to the crimes it so effectively rewards. \VHEN two halves of the world start shouting "Democracy!" at one an- | other, it is time to ask oursélves if it is not possible to attain it in the decency of silence. ATIENCE, please! Death is the last queue we will stand in-and the only one in which everyone will gracefully yield a place. "BIRTHS, deaths and marriages," as a friend rather sadly remarked. "There are so many of them these days." TOLD a friend that was too old to be a poet and should be super- _ annuated. He put me in my place by Saying, "So was Yeats." . [HERE'S a place in England where ) a man told me heshad stood with | his feet in four counties. But he didn’t feel any different. | RECENT correspondence in The Listener leads me to remark that booze, bad language and the Bible have

all had a part in building empires. I'm not taking sides, merely looking at a fact. A SALESMAN told me his best line *" was rat poison. I pointed out that the more he sold the quicker he would be working himself out of a job. \V OMEN’S magazines are all about an improbable kind of love, and men’s magazines all about an improbable kind of woman. N my small town there is a superior rag-shop where one room off the din-ing-room is called the Gainsborough room. They give you a lace tablecloth and a minimum charge. There are no Gainsboroughs. E is, I’m told, a first-class women’s hairdresser. But when, after work, he has to meet women again he really needs a bag of conversation lollies. "Tl DO like your company. You do me nothing but harm." [{ALF-TRUTHS may be as much 4s _ most of us can stand. But why say. for instance, "Trade follows the flag," when it is demonstrably as true that the flag follows trade? ONE of the joys of a democracy is that we have such a right to differ that an editor is as equally concerned with his correspondence columns as with his featured articles.