Bang Goes Threepence

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 886, 27 July 1956, Page 19

Bang Goes Threepence

bJ

SUNDOWNER

JUNE 25

REUD, who had a better reception in America than anywhere else in the world, and still has more disciples there than anywhere else, said once (and perhaps more than once) that Europe’s discovery of America was a calamity. But Freud smoked ten cigars a day and conceded in one of his weak moments that good Virginia went some

distance towards paying for the calamity. I wonder if he ever ate pota-

toes-roast, baked, chipped, or boiled? I woncer if he ever paid ninepence a pound for them, and still thought them cheap at the money? Or did he eat rice when the potato crop failed and pretend that it was a satisfying substitute? But I find it curious that the Americans themselves, though they eat potatoes as freely as we do, sing no songs about them. If there are odes to potatoes in their literature, as there probably are, the odes to corn must outnumber them by a hundred to one. In the eating-houses of 32 States I was not once urged to try a new potato dish, though a potato with a lump of butter is the State emblem of one of them-I think Idaho, where they "fertilise potatoes with corn and irrigate them with milk’--and I have _ never tasted anything better anywhere than the baked potatoes in a little restaurant outside Los Angeles, served hot from a portable oven, cut open as they came on my plate and filled with a creamy cheese sauce. Perhaps someone has told them in Idaho, and in Dakota and Maine, that potatoes are not fruit or roots, but vegetable cancers, All tubers, I think I have read somewhere, are pathological growths started by insects or fungi that shut off circulation and set up a swelling. The "eyes" are just the buds on stems gone wrong-to the great advantege, and even the salvation, of tens of millions of human beings. So at least I have read. It may be science, and it may be nonsense; but if it is nonsense it has somewhere or other got into print, since I am not equal to dreaming it. But men eat and enjoy many patholo-

gical foods in the course of their lives, from paté de foie gras to fat pigs, and the only trouble I myself have in swallowing a potato is the thought that there, without the grace of God, since it is sheer laziness and mismanagement, goes three pence,

JUNE 27

«VERYBODY knows what was wrong with the curate’s egg, but the registered poultry-keepers of Canterbury and Westland don’t seem to know what was wrong with last season’s eggs when they reached the breakfast tables of the consumers, If they know they will not say, or repeat tomorrow what they

solemnly reported yesterday. I have two newspaper clippings in my

hand as I write this note, from successive issues of the same paper, and both buried as "fits’ at the bottom of a column in case they happened to be the nonsense the sub-editor must have suspected they were. In one producers are warned that "the public does not like eggs with dark yolks," and since the customer is always right, they are told that they will have to face the cost of supplying their birds with "more green feed." In the other producers are told that it is "pale-yoked eggs, not the dark ones, which the public does not like," and that the "down-grading" of dark-yolked eggs last year had nothing to do with public taste. I like to see the blind leading the blind, since I am still young enough to enjoy the sensation when both fall into the ditch; but as I did not want to fall in with them, I searched my bookshelves for information about yolk colouring and found neither a fact nor a clue, I suppose the facts are so well known that the authors of my two or three moderately scientific books about poultry did not think it necessary to include them, but even the Encyclopaedia Britannica did not help me. My grandmother, of course, knew how to colour eggs as well as she knew how to suck them, and because she knew I know that when the yolks are pale you give the hens more grass. Now, if anyone wishes to insult my _ grandmother, I have another egg that is neither dark nor pale, but liquid and fragrant, and the colour of thick dish water. It was laid two years ago, and has been lying .since under a bush on a bank for such a dangerous occasion as this: At five or six yards I am sure I could hit a grinning face.

JUNE 29

as * * «VERY farmer who has sheep in Canterbury which know the way to Addington must be as anxious as I am myself about the secrets hidden under their wool, The Department of Agriculture respects neither the rich nor the poor, the watchful nor the careless, the innocent nor the cunning. If their magnifying glass reveals one sign of

life where there should be none, one gently moving leg where there |

should be no suggestion of motion, a | banded back half a millimetre long io a hairy back with spots on it, neither

innocence nor ignorance will save us. A creature so small that my dim eyes can’t see it, so ugly that if I could see it I would smite it hip and thigh, hang it, quarter it, pulverise it, and burn it, will cost me two to five pounds, plus a lawyer, a ticket on my pen that everybody can see, and a line in the newspapers that everybody can read. It is true that I will share my shame with some of the best people, stand (or have a stand-in) in the dock with men of the highest integrity and the most scrupulous respect for the law, and divide a newspaper line with a name that has never appeared in print before since its owner gave up football. But that will be insufficient consolation for my failure at school to learn how to spell Trichodectes ovis and Linognathus pedailis.

JUNE 30

HE snow on the mountains this morning is shining like Shakespeare’s good deed in a naughty world. But we don’t want it to be shining there. We

want it to be running yellow and muddy down the gullies and into the

rivers that fill our lakes and dams. Even the ski reports are a pain in the neck when the bath water is cold, But I would be duller than I have ever been yet in my soul if my heart was not more active than my head when*daylight first brings this glory. My reaction after a few minutes may be that frozen water will not run. My reaction before thought begins is a leap of the .heart and a glow through all my veins. (To be continued)