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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 12, Issue 8 (November 1, 1937)

The Way of a Dust-bin

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.