The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 8 (November 1, 1937)
Hobbies for Hubbies — (Perpetrated and Illustrated by Ken. Alexander.) — The Show goes on
Hobbies for Hubbies
(
Perpetrated and Illustrated by
Ken. Alexander.)
The Show goes on.
It's a great show if you learn your lines.
In this giddy vale of gears
There is laughter mixed with tears,
There is hope and there is sorrow
In the everlasting Morrow;
There is toil and there is play,
Memories of yesterday,
All the light and life of
Now,
While we make our little bow,
On the coloured stage of life—
Mr. Man and Mrs. Wife!
Life's a patterned pantomime,
Organised by Father Time,
Tragedy and Comedy,
Earnest acting, fancy free,
Clowns who toss a quippy quirk,
Drama where the shadows lurk,
Tumblers with their agile pranks,
Saints and sinners, crabs and cranks,
Juveniles and ancient mummers,
Heroes, cravens, dames and drummers,
And the plot, the range and rhyme?
There is none in pantomime.
But, for this, the play's no duller,
There is contrast, change and colour;
When we look for plot we're gone—
Bang the drum! The show goes on!
The Pant in Pantomime.
And how it goes on! The acts change with lightning rapidity, the clown trips over Yorick's skull, the ghost walks arm in arm with Falstaff, the infant Samuel teaches his teacher, the poet blows coloured bubbles, and when the pork butcher catches them and fills them with sausage-meat they are still coloured bubbles; the pantomime elephant runs away from the mouse, the tight-rope walker falls off the step-ladder, the comedian cries over Little Nell and Little Nell laughs because he cries. Logic goes on a jag and Improvidence is married to Prudence. The dunce preaches wisdom and wise men play noughts and crosses on their diplomas. Forethought gazes through his telescope while Destiny nibbles at his heels. There is madness in earnestness and sanity in the maddest acts.
It's a great play if you don't insist on sense; for the climax is locked in a box and the key is held by old Uncle Ultimate. You take the show on trust or you don't take it at all. The brothers Why and Wherefore are dumb, and Ballyhoo is an auctioneer selling hot air in coloured bottles.
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“Solving the Riddle of the Universe.”
The Unimportance of Earnestness.
Men do foolish things to keep themselves sane. They make work of a hobby lest they make a hobby of work. A man from Mars, suddenly coming on a football match, might imagine that such fervent energy must be aimed at some sublime end. If he were to watch a golfer in a bunker he might think that the unfortunate one was there to expatiate some nameless sin or to solve the riddle of the universe. And he would be right, although he would-not know it.
For, to get the mind off the mind is the first step to supreme wisdom. Hence the hobby—the apparently mild mania that drives men to drive from the tee and dive in the sea; to stick stamps in books and brood over them like a clucky hen with an everlasting egg.
The Hobbyous Corpus Act.
A hobby is something upon which he can get a grip when his feet slither on the greasy-pole of existence. He clings to his hobby with the tenacity of a fly to a ceiling. Derision only makes it dearer. Opposition fans the flame of fervour. Whether his particular mild mania be collecting Victorian whiskers or woofit's eggs, whether his interest is concentrated on flinging a large wooden ball at other large wooden balls, or whether he prefers to do things with his feet that motor cars can do far better, the hostile hoot and the snooky sniff only add to his addled ardour.
Should he be a collector of tin tacks the scornful scowl will drive him on to lead-headed nails and then to six-inch bolts. If pushed to the wall he might get down on second-hand sections of railway line or even shop-soiled girders.
He may be a collector of matchbox lids. One wifely sniff of derisatory doubt will be sufficient to set him off on dust-bin lids. The sterner the opposition the bigger he goes; and he'd never regret it. He'd find adventure and interest enow in creating the only collection of dust-bin lids extant. For people harbour a strange aversion from having the lids of their bins pilfered. He might covet his neighbour's socks or his axe or anything that is his, and get away with it as a spot of playful larceny; but let him rattle a dust-bin lid and the neighbour opens the window and flings a boot last at him.
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carried away in the heat of the moment
ken alexander
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“Collect a complete set of Victorian whiskers.”
The Way of a Dust-bin.
Perhaps a man becomes unreasonably attached to his dust-bin because he is usually doing something with it. If he isn't clamping a new bottom on it he is trying to discover where the dustman flung it. If the cats are not upending it, the wind is rolling it down the garden path. If the children are not using it as a wicket he is searching through it for his collar studs or the toast rack. It is ad endearing domestic emblem like the crack in the bathroom window that he promised to rectify in nineteen-fifteen, the tapping downpipe, the door handle that has fallen off twice a day for twelve years and all the other dear deficiencies that make for homely comfort and conversation. We recommend a dust-bin-lid collection to anyone who desires to combine the aesthetic with the athletic and the splenetic. The horticultural hobbyist whose most treasured cabbage wouldn't get a consolation prize at a noxious weed display gets more kick out of crooning “The Heart Bowed Down” to it in the twilight than the market gardener gets out of ten acres of dedicated drumheads. The home carpenter thinks more of the cot he made out of a cheese crate and the hind legs of the step-ladder than Chippendale did of his chippiest chip. The shelf that father put up was dear to his heart even if it did fall down when mother breathed heavily on it. In such things lurks sanity, forgetfulness of the moribund motto that “life is realty, life is earnings.”
Hobbies for hubbies is the clarion cry even if, carried away in the heat of the moment, men seem to slip back to the careless days of childhood.