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On A Perfect Place For A Holiday

I was recently engaging a fair maid in light converse, when she happened to say that she knew a splendid place to spend a holiday. Before she could finish her sentence I broke in with some irrelevant remark, and naturally she became somewhat cold and stern.

Unwittingly I had offended her in a manner wherein scores of students daily offend their fellows—I wished always to talk and never to listen. Go where you will in this University of ours, you will find many people scramblingly eager to get their conversational leg in first, but never quite succeeding. In the corridors, in the common rooms, male, female and common, in that closely guarded temple of the Great God Punch, called the executive room, yea, even in the lecture rooms always it is the same—some idiot must hold forth when others have wiser and wittier things to say.

Perhaps you, gentle reader, are the exception, or, like Lamb, the child in the forbidden orchard, you transgress only now and then: If such you be, then I must mark you well, for Victoria University College hath need of you. Like many a better convert before me, I have become fanatical in the cause I affected to despise. My hope is to form a League of Good Listeners, who should endeavour to combat this insidious and growing evil.

Insidious is the correct epithet to apply to this evil, for if you are a Bad Listener or suffer from Halitosis, the insidious thing about it is that even your best friend will not tell you—and for the same reason.

We none of us like to be reminded of our failings and your Bad Listener is generally a prosy fellow, who would be profoundly shocked to hear that he is a windy bore and far from being the jolly fellow, the life and soul of every party, that he imagines himself to be.

When first we enter the portals of this College many of us taste the joys of freedom—no longer are there any parents, prefects, or praeceptors to hold us in thrall and to tell us we should be seen and not heard.

This freedom, won by ordeal of examination, and qualified though it may later appear to be, is sufficiently potent and acts like strong wine on our unbalanced minds. Accordingly we fledglings twitter about, harmless enough in our doings, but, like all young things, we sometimes use too ingenuously our newly acquired faculties.

For instance, when in the common room you may be bursting to tell the true story of the nobleman and the bull at the Winter Show, or some such tale, the strain involved in shouting down the contenders for the floor takes away all your joy in the proceedings. And so it is with us all—when we particularly desire to speak, our fellows are so contentious that nobody speaks with any coherence at all. In short, our talk is frequently so over full of "hard brilliance" and so disjointed that we would fain agree with Don Alhambra when he says:

"When every blessed thing you hold
Is made of silver, or of gold,
You long for simple pewter."

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Go now to a group of what Alpha of the Plough calls "Clubbable Men" and you will see what it is that we have not yet acquired. We none of us take pleasure in being "eloquent listeners"—we all talk for admiration and not for enjoyment. Until we realise the truths contained in Alpha's essay "On Talk and Talkers" and apply its lesson to ourselves, we are in danger of becoming bores to people around us wherever we may be—a sad reward for the tribulations we have undergone to acquire a University education.

Meanwhile I must hasten to find out the name of that perfect place for a holiday.

"Ajax."