Little rays of moonshineHerbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
General
Little rays of moonshine
Herbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
English essays -- 20th century; English wit and humor
The same applies to smoking. It is incredible that to-day in the
twentieth century there should be no recognised way of disposing of
cigarette-ends in the bath. Personally I only smoke pipes in the bath,
but it is impossible to find a place in which to deposit even a pipe so
that it will not roll off into the water. But I have a brother-in-law
who smokes cigars in the bath, a disgusting habit. I have often
wondered where he hid the ends, and I find now that he has made a
_cache_ of them in the gas-ring of the geyser. One day the ash will get
into the burners and then the geyser will explode.
Next door to the shaving and smoking tray should be the book-rest.
I don’t myself do much reading in the bath, but I have several
sisters-in-law who keep on coming to stay, and they all do it. Few
things make the leaves of a book stick together so easily as being
dropped in a hot bath, so they had better have a book-rest; and if they
go to sleep I shall set in motion my emergency waste mechanism, by
which the bath can be emptied in malice from outside.
Another of my inventions is the Progress Indicator. It works like the
indicators outside lifts, which show where the lift is and what it is
doing. My machine shows what stage the man inside has reached--the
washing stage or the merely wallowing stage, or the drying stage, or
the exercises stage. It shows you at a glance whether it is worth while
to go back to bed or whether it is time to dig yourself in on the mat.
The machine is specially suitable for hotels and large country houses
where you can’t find out by hammering on the door and asking, because
nobody takes any notice.
When you have properly fitted out the bathroom on these lines all that
remains is to put the telephone in and have your meals there; or rather
to have your meals there and not put the telephone in. It must still
remain the one room where a man is safe from that.
A Criminal Type
TO-DAY I am MAKing aN inno6£vation. as you mayalready have guessed, I
am typlng this article myself Zz½lnstead of writing it, The idea is to
save time and exvBKpense, also to demonstyap demonBTrike= =damn, to
demonstratO that I can type /ust as well as any blessed girl 1f I give
my mInd to iT”” Typlng while you compose is really extraoraordinarrily
easy, though composing whilr you typE is more difficut. I rather think
my typing style is going to be different froM my u6sual style, but
Idaresay noone will mind that much. looking back i see that we made
rather a hash of that awfuul wurd extraorordinnaryk? in the middle
of a woRd like thaton N-e gets quite lost? 2hy do I keep putting
questionmarks instead of fulstopSI wonder. Now you see i have put a
fulllstop instead Of a question mark it nevvvver reins but it yours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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