Coming Round the Bend

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 27

Coming Round the Bend

WITH DENIS GLOVER NE girl said to another, "He must : be a very unhappy man-he didn’t even look mie up and down." WITTY friend says that democracy is always right about its rights and wrong about its values. N old man died the other day at ninety after having been drinking himself to death for seventy years. S if to emphasise his wandering eyes he had bags under them. HERE'S a song which begins, "Good morning, Brother Sunshine." Other characters in the cast are Sister Song, Brother Gladness, and Sister Smile: A man called Foley wrote the words, and Liza Lehmann set them. I know nothing else against either of them. "(OD give me-" is a popular beginning to a certain kind of song. In it the singer makes a number of re-quests-it may be for the moon, the stars or, more modestly, for a loving heart. But I can think of no occasion when anybody has asked straight out for a better singing voice. HE Lord giveth and the Law taketh -" away. : f \W OULD that we could bring to the ; examination of our stupidities the clarity and insight that we do to those of others. ; T’S hard to fit everything into the week, but I admired the lack of rancour of the woman who told me that theirs was a proper golfer’s garden. ‘THE bigger the deceptions in any profession, the more strenuous the efforts to present an impeccable code of ethics to the public. — HE ballad began as "popular" -" poetry. Then it became a literary exercise. Are even the best of the literary ballads as widely effective as "Paddy McGinty’s Goat"? | IFE is change-mostly short change. N these days Jack is not merely as good as his master: he expects, and gets, rather more money. [t is a dubious sort of flattery to be ~ told, "This is a poem you are not yet worthy of writing." NOR is the pun to be appreciated by the Progress League when someone said, "I am plain sick of Canterbury!" F you ever meet a journalist who isn't a cynic, he’s not a good journalist. A VERY nice euphemism is that of the Maori chief who referred to "King George’s farm at Port Jackson."