As crazes go, it is pleasingly odd, even rather beautiful: for some
strange reason, pouring milk over yourself makes your head go black and white,
whilst your surroundings remain in colour.
And, for all the instant indignation, there have been many more
off-putting student crazes. In the spring of 1939, for instance, a craze for
swallowing goldfish swept America. It
all began at Harvard on March 3, 1939, when a student called Lothrop Withington
Jr boasted to his common room that he had just swallowed a goldfish. This gave
rise to a modest goldfish-swallowing contest in the dining hall.
The word soon spread around other colleges. Frank Hope, a student from
Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, called Withington ‘a sissy’
and managed to swallow three goldfish, having first sprinkled them with salt
and pepper. The next day, another student swallowed six.
Harvard retaliated, upping the ante when a student called Irving Clark
swallowed 24 fish. The contest then accelerated, with the University Of
Michigan scoring 28, Boston College 29, Albright College 33 and MIT 42. Eventually,
the record peaked at a truly horrible 300 before the craze died out, as crazes
do.
Or do they? Some do, but some don’t. Look at our store room, Mouldy cardboard boxes
are full of items which, at one time, were the Latest Thing but are now like
relics from the olden days: Rubik’s
Cubes, some Filofaxes , electric pet
chicken, a toasted sandwich maker, Cabbage Patch Kids, a bean bag, and a novel by Dan Brown.
Some crazes look as though they are here to stay, but then, for no
apparent reason, they disappear. Just imagine how wacky the first man to wear a
tie around his neck must have seemed! Friends would have crossed the street to
avoid him, he would have been blackballed from all the smartest clubs, and
experts would have muttered: ‘It’ll never catch on.’
The train, the car, the newspaper and the television were all once just
passing fads, and perhaps one day that is what they will prove to be; it’s just
that some fads pass quicker than others.
Meanwhile, we should be wary of writing off ‘milking’ as just another
craze…..lol…….. Yes, it may go the way
of other crazes, such as streaking and seeing how many students can squeeze
into a phone-booth and swallowing goldfish.
But who knows? In 100 years’ time, milking may be all the rage, and
instead of gathering for a game of Scrabble or monopoly , we will gather to
pour milk over each other’s faces, before going in for dinner
