Bermuda'' through the eyes of well-known columnist, Mr. Allan Fotheringham.

In the May 4 issue of Maclean's magazine, Mr. Fotheringham compares the Island to the Stone Age comic figure Alley Oop, who was transmitted from civilisation to civilisation through a giant time machine.

"There is, believe me, the same sort of time machine implicit when one flies into the other worldly Island haven of Bermuda, sitting all by itself out in the Atlantic, sealed off from cares, frozen in the past,'' he explains.

"There is the impression that one has walked back into 1942, all the blondes in picture hats, all the men in jackets at all the right times of day, every building either pink or white, all of it right out of a movie script starring Sonny Tufts and Gene Tierney.'' Bermuda's English ties are appreciated and said to extend from the taxi trade to old world customs practised at the Coral Beach and Tennis Club.

"In Bermuda, frozen in the 1940s, a cab driver goes by the name of Llewellyn Phipps,'' he writes. "He is prototypical: middle-aged, gentle, polite and regards his job as rather alike to what in other cultures would be regarded as a respectable trade -- a butcher perhaps, or a barber, possibly a minor-grade lawyer...

"Ladies at the Coral Beach and Tennis Club tend to have names like Gracyn. If not Muffy and Mimi and Fluffy and Cindy. This is the New England Establishment at play...Bermuda is perhaps the only resort in the world where you have to dress better than you do at home.'' Describing Bermuda as "an experience everyone should touch,'' Mr.

Fotheringham writes fondly of it as a realm where "rules still count and the chaps retire for cigars and port after dinner, while the ladies go elsewhere to talk about the children...

"Madonna would not be happy on Bermuda -- nor welcome. Muffy, in her picture hat, would not be amused.'' ARE YOU SITTING COMFORTABLY? -- Lady Swan reads a popular bedtime story to captivated youngsters from Harrington Primary School. The school staged a special "Read-In'' last Friday evening to encourage pupils to pick up the reading habit.

THE CHAMPIONS -- Mr. Shannon Peniston (left) of Paget Parish and Mr. Leslie N.

Tucker of Warwick Parish won first and second places respectively in the Island's first inter-parish Mad Bull Hammer Kite Competition. Organised by Mr.

Renalda Bean at Elbow Beach on April 12, the $100 proceeds from the event will go to Agape House.