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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 5, Issue 4 (August 1, 1930)

Weather or No

Weather or No.

It is unwise, dear reader, to vocalise to a vegetarian on the vitaministic virtues of the gentle giblet; it is unsafe to broadcast on the farinaceous fertility of the faithful filbert to a “beefologist”; it is suicidal to spill the beans on the Tyranny of Time to the spouse of the house in the grey dawn of the subsequent morn; but it is always safe to swap weather retorts, discuss meteorological metamorphosis, and put the nips into Nature with anyone you meet except the meteorologist, who not unreasonably resents any extemporaneous expression of opinion on the sacred subjects of hyperborean hysteria and the ethics of the elements. All other topics become stale with greater celerity than a decadent duck egg, but the weather as material for padding the forms of speech is imperishable. It is a fact, dear reader, that there is more weather to the liquid ounce in this land of “speedom” than there are chins on a Chinchilla; the weather is more universal than Esperanto or lumbago; meteorology and psychology are “twinologies”; they either synchronise salubriously under the greenwood tree or they camp under a gamp, and simultaneously simulate a sea-soaked sock; for it is the weather which puts the “sigh” in psychology and the “fizz” into physiology, in terms of its temperature; when Nature hits the mat, human nature whips the cat, but when the elements don the garments of sunshine and salubrity man bursts with benevolence and goes among the people crying: “Aye, verily, brethren and sistern, is not the day a ‘humdazzler,’ a veritable cough-drop, in fact the cat's whiskers?” And the populace answer unto him as one man, saying: “Sure baby,” “Betcher,” and the atmosphere buzzes with the bacteria of hysteria and the vitamins of victory; men go forth among the people spreading good cheer and sales-talk, and prosperity lies upon the land; people even contract matrimony with naught but optimism to support their faith in the future. Dear reader, dead silence often is safer than lively speech, but in the most debilitated situation it is safe to aver that it was a fine winter last summer, or to venture a guess as to what day summer will fall on during the current year.

Thus this climatic clatter — these meteorological mutterings.