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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 9, Issue 3 (June 1, 1934.)

Wild Winter and Other Nasty Knocks

page 9

Wild Winter and Other Nasty Knocks

Mind Over Mud.

Enter Winter with his frozen face, his blizzard blues, his shrieks and rattles, his downpours and uproars, and his impertinent pandemonium. What do we care for his water-works, his gusty gambols, his cold comfort, and his microbean machinations?

Ho, Winter, with your mud and scud,
You try to freeze our bones and blood,
And make us feel like scuttled mutton.
We don't care half a trouser's button
For all your oozy ballyhoo—
We've got the winter goods on you.
Your hoary hand and muddy feet
Can't scare us now—we's got you beat.
However fierce your tag and tug be,
We knock you back with games like Rugby;
And hockey, golf and soccer, too,
Are here to put it over you.
You think to make us miss our step—
Your efforts only give us pep,
To run the harder up and down
Some muddy field—yes, you can frown—
But we defeat your prods and pulls,
By building up the corpuscles
With ox-tail soup and suchlike things,
To counteract your stabs and stings.
You howl and scream, you bleak-faced blot,
And whistle through the chimney-pot;
You fill the fields with slush and mires,
But we defeat your stings with fires.
And listen while you “do your nut”
In frenzy, round the water butt.
In fact we get so used to you
And all your bawling ballyhoo,
We know that you are not so tough
As one would think—so cut the rough!
And when you howl from morn to Mond'ys,
We answer you with thicker “undies,”
And chase a ball through mud and ooze,
To dissipate your blizzard blues.
You're not as clever as you thought,
For our reply is—Winter Sport!
We keep your chilly rage in check
By jumping on each other's neck
On Saturdays. By such K.O-ing
We keep the circulation going,
And roll each other in the mud,
To speed the movement of the blood.
So now you know, with all your fuss,
You haven't got the wood on us.

A Means to an End.

In winter the thoughts turn to sports in which action is acrobatically accelerated; and, of these chill-dispelling gambols, Rugby is the most riotously rigorous; for, when thirty doughty dispellers of ennui congregate on the campus to oscillate the oval with boot, beef and abandon, membrane and muscle are mainly a means to an up-end.

Rugby! What a game to give you that screwshin feeling! What a hurly-burly for the burly! What a game for the “game!” A game wherein the best man is not always on top nor is it any disgrace to be “sat on;” essentially a pastime for the physically fit and the naturally “nifty.” For I fear, oldtimer, if you and I were to enter the arena, as of yore, we would have to be re-inflated at the nearest service station. But boys are boys, and their corpuscles cry for the clash of arms—and legs; the bounding oval has the skin they love to touch and the good earth rushes up to meet them from time to time with rough caresse—or so the poet has it; but the Rugby realist simply says he has “come a thud.” But what does he care; he's tough with training, and through his veins the corpuscles zoom with zest. He is imbued with the spirit of “e-sprint de cops,” he has the will to win—if he can, and the will not to whine if he can't.

“That half-back feeling.”

“That half-back feeling.”

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The world forgetting,
By the world forgot,
His dearest hope,
To kick a “pot;”
Or, failing this,
To take a fly
Across the line,
And score a try.

Believe it or believe it not, the value of this sport of springs—apart from taking the chill off the weather—is its ability to inculcate in its adherents the spirit of the ancient philosophers, that “game for the game's sake” sentiment. For philosophy is a dying art like thinking out of office hours and preferring the throaty throb of the thrush to the honk of the fleeting “flivver.”

Furore and Philosophy.

Philosophy is the love of Wisdom, and Wisdom lies best on the breast of Nature. Birds, beasts and the flowers of the field, the winds carrying the challenge of outer emptiness, the stormscarred face of the misty mountain, the river rushing to the ocean, the ocean assailing the shore, the whitewinged frigates of the heavens plowing athwart the horizon—these were the books from which the philosophers learnt their lessons of patience and proportion, fitness and fidelity. But man has roofed the sky, put blinkers over his inner eye, and sacked his sense of wonder.

Would he scurry through the corridors of life like a tin hare pursued by a plumber if he paused for a moment to consider that, judged by the standard of the stars, his span is but the flick of a fly's eyelid? Would he squander the seconds on portentous puttering if he realised that, judged by the age of his own earth, he is dead before he has drawn his first breath?

He might, for he seethes with synthetic sapience and prefers the delusions of a distracted de-mock-racy to the satisfying symbolism of Nature's complex simplicity. He prefers to buy “bunk” second-hand rather than get his greens fresh from the fields. Which is why fallacy flourishes and the sins of the fatheads are visited upon the children so that the only stars they know are movie stars, and their lessons are learnt from the halls of Hollywood.

Cine-smatter-graph.

For there still exist movie-mugnates who make jack-pots of jimmy-o-goblius from demented drama, comatose comedy and celluloid sentiment, sawn off by dire-wreckers whose knowledge of life is drawn from a ready-reckoner, and whose watch-words are “reels, not reality,” and “the pay's the thing.”

But hustled humanity hurries to the silver screen to forget real life in reel life. They long for Love that would make an impassioned peppercorn look like a chilblain on a Baffin Bay beaver. They dream of Drama—such drama as would make a Peruvian election look like a Boy Scout's good-deed day; and Comedy so comicallous that it would cause Old King Cole to howl for the hemlock or get a laugh out of a bout of gout. They look for Life with a capital “lie,” a moral tone three bars lower than a flat-fish's chest, and a sentimental savour so sticky that, in comparison, treacle would make a skating rink for “skeeters.”

Happily, there are excellent exceptions to these cellu-lies but, unhappily, it is the deceptions that prove the rueall; and such deceptions give the lie to life and cause the young of the species to accept the reel before reality.

But, prithee brothers, we grow old thus to prattle of philosophy. The poets are busy writing slogans for soap, the dreamers are dead of insomnia, and, well, the Old Earth doesn't seem to care a quorum of quakes whether we turn on her the optic of approbation or the eye of obloquy. But: —

“A boy-scout's good deed day.”

“A boy-scout's good deed day.”

It's well, just now and then, to stand aloof.
And “pipe” the jostling orbs it: Heaven's roof.
To try, by mathematic means, to measure
Our value ‘mongst the gems in Nature's treasure.
And, if we still feel full of sinful beans,
We're either great—or lack all mental means.
It's well to wonder, when we watch the sky,
If this small sphere would meet the naked eye
Of someone knowing nought at all about it,
Nor even if it lived—well folks. I doubt it.