“One often wonders where mothers learned all about the things they tell their daughters not to do.”
John Lentell
4 October 1971
Sunday’s Piece
A society matron was looking at a new picture she’d had taken.
“Why, it’s an outrage!” she stormed. “Now I ask you, does it look like me?”
The photographer was flustered for a moment but quickly regained his composure.
“Madam,” he said, bowing slightly, “the answer is in the negative.”
John Lentell
3 October 1971
(Photo: Pingu. Remember this quote is from the days of film cameras, before digital!)
Saturday’s Piece
“Everyone lives by selling something.”
(Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850 – 1894)
John Lentell
1 October 1971
Friday’s Piece
“Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can’t build on it it’s only good for wallowing in.”
(Katherine Mansfield, prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer and poet, 1888 – 1923)
John Lentell
2 October 1971
Wednesday’s Piece
“…This woman, through great effort, did manage to achieve a cold, mechanical perfection in whatever she did, but it was at the expense of joy and spontaneity and warmth. She was perfect, a perfect bore.”
(Don’t Grow Old – Grow up! Know, Be and Like Yourself by Dorothy Carnegie)
John Lentell
30 September 1971
Tuesday’s Piece
“An auction is where you buy stuff from somebody else’s attic to store in your own.”
John Lentell
29 September 1971
Monday’s Piece
“When you are an anvil be patient; when a hammer strike.”
(Arabian proverb)
John Lentell
28 September 1971
Sunday’s Piece
“…I, with many a fear
For my dear Country, many heartfelt sighs,
Among Men who do not love her, linger here.”
(Poems dedicated to National Independence, William Wordsworth, 1770 – 1850)
John Lentell
27 September 1971
Photo: Kloof St, Cape Town
Saturday’s Piece
“There are three Johns:
1. The real John, known only to his maker.
2. John’s ideal John, never the real one, and often very unlike him.
3. Thomas’s ideal John, never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very unlike either.”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, 1809 – 1894, American physician, poet, and polymath)
John Lentell
26 September 1971
Photo: three Johns – John the original, John Kilgour (me) and Jon Paul two weeks ago in Joburg
Friday’s Piece
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”
(Ernest Hemingway, 1899 – 1961)
John Lentell
25 September 1971
(Photo: choice of teas at WorkInProgress, Woodstock Exchange, Cape Town. Reflecting on the chequered history of the past 49 years since this piece was published by my father in the Rhodesia Herald newspaper in 1971..)
Thursday’s Piece
“Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.”
(Adam Gordon, 1833 – 1870, was an Australian poet, jockey, police officer and politician. A statue to his memory stands near parliament house, Melbourne.)
John Lentell
24 September 1971
Wednesday’s Piece
“Auntie, did you feel no pain
Falling from that apple-tree?
Would you do it, please, again?
Cuz my friend here didn’t see.”
(From ‘Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes‘ by Harry Graham, 1874 – 1936)
John Lentell
22 September 1971
(Photo: my father used to type all these “piece for the day” entries using a typewriter on printed forms for “smalls” listings provided by the Rhodesia Herald / Sunday Mail newspapers, then hand deliver them to the newspaper office in “town”. Occasionally he would a note like this one using another form, for the newspaper office’s attention!)
Tuesday’s Piece
“Since ’tis Nature’s law to change,
Constancy alone is strange.”
(John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, 1647 – 1680… became as well known for his rakish lifestyle as his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died as a result of venereal disease at the age of 33.)
John Lentell
23 September 1971
(Photo: with nature, Cape Point, 2016)
Monday’s Piece
“Let the scintillations of your wit be like the coruscations of summer lightning, lambent but innocuous.”
(Meyrick Goulburn, 1818 – 1897)
John Lentell
21 September 1971
(Photo: with Serena, Sydney Nov 2019)
Sunday’s Piece
“No man worth having is true to his wife, or can be true to his wife, or ever was, or ever will be so.”
From the Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, a Restoration comedy from 1696 written by John Vanbrugh
John Lentell
20 September 1971
(Photo: with Harry Lentell, Wellington, NZ, 2017)
Saturday’s Piece
“The want of a thing is perplexing enough, but the possession of it is intolerable.”
(Sir John Vanbrugh, English architect, dramatist and herald, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, 1664- 1726)
John Lentell
19 September 1971
Friday’s Piece
“Ex Africa semper aliquid novi.”
There is always something new from Africa
(Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, A.D 23 – 79)
John Lentell
18 September 1971
(Photo – with JP and Melissa, Joburg, January 2020)
Thursday’s Piece
Sir Stephen Rice…. having been often heard to say, before he was a judge, that he will drive a coach and six horses through the Act of Settlement.
John Lentell
17 September 1971
Wednesday’s Piece
“I don’t set up to be no judge of right and wrong in men,
I’ve lost the trail sometimes myself an’ may get lost again,
An’ when I see a chap who looks as though he’s gone astray,
I want to shove my hand in his an’ help him find the way.”
(J.A. Foley)
John Lentell
16 September, 1971
(Photo – Ivan Lentell)
Tuesday’s Piece
“Item, I give my wife my second best bed, with the furniture.”
(From Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament signed on 25 March 1616)
John Lentell
15 September 1971
(Photo: with Magaya Kahondo, Harare, July 2018 – photo credit Ivan Lentell)
Lentell Soup 