English people, unwilling to break a 500-year-old custom, though the danger against which they continue to take "precautions" has long since ceased to exist, are not unmindful of the more real threats to their security from another quarter. Londoners, in the main, have taken quite cheerfully to air-raid shelters, though gardeners have grumbled about the spoiling of their plans, cidentally, these refugees are familiarly as "Anderson shel-but I doubt whether the nickname will stick. The term lacks the alliterative attraction of Belisha Beacon, which has become part of everyman's vocabulary. The bathing station in Hyde Park, opened by the Commissioner of Works in the last Lanour Government, is still referred to as "Lansbury's Lido."
Another sign of the times I notice recently was a bullet-proof waistcoat displayed in a Pall Mall sword shop. Business in these garments, I am told, is always brisk at times of international crises. Weighing twelve pounds the waistcoat costs £7.10s. and is claimed to stop anything but a direct hit, against which the wearer needs three waistcoats to protect himself.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.