HOLIDAY TIME FOR ALL

Radio Record, Volume XII, Issue 27, 16 December 1938, Page 31

HOLIDAY TIME FOR ALL

oe Oe All Essays For Columbia Pictures’ Ideal Holiday Competition Must Be In By December 20 COLUMBIA Pictures’ "Ideal Holiday" Competition is moving to its close. The final winner, the lucky person who is to receive a fortnight's free holiday either at Rotorua _ or Caroline Bay, Timaru (plus, of course, all the contributed awards which go with the first prize) will be announced in the "Record" dated January 6, 1939. It will be a fine New Year gift for somebody. Essays for the final competition must be in by December 20. The winner for that week will be announced in the "Record" of December 30, and the final. winner a week later.

T has been most interesting watching the progress of the competition. Right at the beginning entries were heavy, and interest has been growing all the way. The result naturally, is that Columbia Pictures are the proud possessors of hundreds of ideas on the subject of ideal holidays. There is sufficient information and accumulated wisdom in those essays to start a travel service. Essays have come from all over New Zealand, and even’from Aus‘tralia, Last week’s most interest- | ing essay was submitted by a steward on a coastal cargo vessel, and his idea of how he would spend his ideal holiday has a definite morai for discontended city folk. "I work seven days a week serving meals to other people," he writes, "and I am away most of the time from my family and home, "All I want is to be at home and eut my hedges and lawns, and do all sorts of odd jobs that require to be done; to go out with my wife and family, taking them shopping or to the theatre." It seems to bear out everything the old song says about home, Winning Essay THERE was no diffieulty in selecting the winner of this week’s prize. It goes to Mr. C. J. Treadwell, of Wellington, whose essay contains some pungent observations on holidays in general. Mr. Treadwell is obviously no novice when it comes to setting his thoughts down on paper, but his was the best essay submitted, and the prize goes.to him.

Here its his essay:1 know of nothing so unpleasant to an early morning ear as the mocking challenge of the kitchen alarm clock, aid nothing so humiliating as the attempts (though surprisingly often successful), to catch the train to work. "What I need,’ we invariably murmur as we clutch desperately at the disappearing rail of the guard’s van, "is a. good holiday. And about Christmas time the chance regularly comes around. Thus it is that a casual observer at one of our popujar beaches on the 23rd instant may view with unconcern a wide yet deserted beach, and on the following day may see no beach but a surging, shrieking conglomeration of bank managers, clerks, accountants, their wives, children and relations, Then there is the mountaineer. Our casual observer, if he chances by some overwhelming stroke of coincidence, to be piloting a ’plane over, let us say; the Tararuas, in a bieak southerly gale, may raise his eyebrows in surprise to hear, emanating from practically impassable tracks hewn in the sides of New Zealand’s toughest rock, the moving strains of "The Campbells are Coming." He will then know that a herd of these mountain climbers is at work. Then | am told that to some of us, our country presents certain attractions. These Christmas rustics jump up in the morning at 6.30, breathe deepiy and appreciatively, and imagine that they can smell the glorious scent of rose-blossoms permeating the

morning air. They breakfast hugely off brown trout and green apples, then read in the sun. In the afternoon they read in the sun, At night time, for want of something better to do, they stroke the cat population or. read, though, to relieve the monotony, not in the sun. And so to bed. No, | won’t take the credit for the last four words. . Pepys thought of them first, And" it was Pepys, or James Agate, or P, G. Wodehouse (1 can never remember which), who. profited’. from the wahderings of others and devised the real holiday. Having arrived at a resort, it was the. custom of one of the above gentlemen to dismiss his wife with a. few curt ‘words, speak insultingly and .with perfect candour to the maid, and go to sleep. He would wake and eat largely and noisily. And so to bed again. . His pian, flawless as it appears at first sight, lacks perfection in one detail, and that has to do with the horrible strain of waking up for meals.