REPORT ON COMPETITION NO. lo THE usual prizes were offered
for a dissertation of not more than 35o words on the English Week-end, as it might be written by a foreign anthropologist. Judging from the rather meagre number of entries submitted for this competition, the English Week-end is a subject either too sacred or too horrible for the ordinary man to write about ; however, all the entries that did come in were either perspicacious or enter- taining or both—an unusual state of affairs, it must be confessed. The two most entertaining of all, being based on a liberal misconception of what a decorous journal wishes to be understood from the term " week-end," were unfortunately suitable only for private circulation ; and the prizes accordingly go to E. H. Bedwell and Emil Paton, whose interpretation of two anthropological schools were, if less exuberant, more
to the intended point. First Prize.
Probably nothing Illustrates more graphically the curious and paradoxical nature of these English islanders than their conduct at their " week-ends." From observation during the week from, say, Tuesday to Friday one decides that the race is lethargic ; but, at the week-end holiday, instead of seizing the opportunity to sink into a deeper lassitude, they galvanise into an astonishing, unceasing physical activity. Again, undemonstrative for five days, it will spend the two free days, not in a consistent profounder reserve, but in forgathering in the big cities for wildly demon- strative ebullitions of political feeling ; thus, moreover, contradict- ing a nature which is often described by their own native inter- preters as being non-political, ungregarious and imbued with a love for rurality. They arc sober and colourless of choice for five days, but in the other two take to clothes of garish chro- maticism. Their N.S.P.C.A. has the regard of them all ; yet the week-end is passed in numerous areas with a vigorous maiming and killing of completely inoffensive animals. It is an uncerebrat- ing race ; yet I have observed crowded sections of it spending one week-end after another at marathon bridge. The English are commonly described as insular ; yet no race is more representea at Le Touquet during the week-ends. Obsessed as it is with a national punctilio known as " good form " it has but to be embroiled in popular travel at the week-end for it instantaneously to liberate itself from this obsession, and puzzle the foreign observer by a quick change from a mannerly phlegm to a meridional irascibility.
Paradoxical and curious, indeed! One speculates how the inconsistency of the race would be evinced had this particular opportunity for it, the week-end, not arisen. Then one remembers that the English, despite the characteristically deceptive lethargy, have history to prove them industrious. And, this being so, are not the English consistently paradoxical in being also the originators of one of leisure's major assertations, the week-end?
E. H. BEDWELL.
Second Prize.
The week end he is become a disease of the English and is eating into every class. As Friday approach a nostalgia seizes everyone to go or do something different. The King for example lives in a Palace, for the week end he must go to live in a house. Those in town must go to the country, those in country to a plage.
The husbands and fathers of those deposited in asylums safe from booms must week-end with them. What gate smashers I They arrive with much appetites and the unfortunates, already burdened with their wives and young, must feed them also.
Town people can go in full trains many hundred miles at quarter fare for a few hours in Dublin or Liverpool.
But I would speak of country house parties to which all have ambition to go. What a running to answer the telephone hoping for invitations and what a sad look when it is only the old aunt to ask the address of a bureau as her cook has a fit or some such tom-foolery.
I was at a country house, arrived in front of the week enders and heard this so strange invitation given on 'phone by my hostess. She said " Darlings you must come for the week end. The Jumps will be here and Twib and Trotty—two young terriers and flappers to play with them and I must ask a cutlet or two!" Later I ask " What are these cutlets?" She say '" Oh, Paybacks. Cutlet for cutlet, you know." Picture now the packing up sticks for golf, rods for fishes, guns for poultry, bats for the crickets and tennis.
If the weather is fine—good; if not you can only go out and get wet and come in and get dry and a crossness comes along. Other things too hitch. Trotty (he is an old Colonel Trotter), he affects the most young of the flappers, so one terrier he sulk. Mrs. Jump she snub a she-cutlet and Mr. Jump he start the cold in the nose.
Often it seem a relief when Monday morning pushes all off in different ways but next Friday will find them all determined to make another week end.
EMIL PATON.
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