RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 44

RANDOM REMINDER

TURNOVER

One of the stranger Saturday sights in Christchurch is the weirdly-laden traffic proceeding at sober pace to the graveyards of antiquity. The rubbish dumps do a brisk business every week-end. Our observation of them has not been close, and it has not produced anything of particular consequence. Driving past, one can see the heaps, and a few people straying through and round them, like rather dispirited seagulls. But our colleagues insist that the activity at the dumps is usually much more worth watching. We seem to have been distinctly unlucky. One friend, for instance, recalls having arrived at a Christchurch dump with a barrel, a relict of a ribtous

student party of the previous evening. He and a friend untied the barrel and set it off rolling downhill towards the main part of the dump. Apparently this began a reaction rather similar to that common on a test Rugby field when the ball is thrown into a line-out. Hurrying, scurrying people came from everywhere, and the barrel was a long way short of its objective when it was intercepted, stopped and borne away in triumph by a large gentleman with an orange beard and sandshoes. Someone had thrown bread to the gulls. Two other men who shared a flat decided they would rid their home of some of its more atrocious ornaments and objects d’art, legacies left by the

previous tenants, for obvious reasons. Yet before they had completed unloading their white elephants at the dump, they were astounded to see their major works of art, the “Retreat from Moscow” and the “Siege of Sebastopol" both indescribably ghastly prints, leaving the . place firmly tied to the sides of an ancient motorcar. There are better pickings, at times. And we will be good enough to let all the vultures into a secret Any day now, one of our friends is going to leave at a Christchurch dump a wire gate, of standard size, perfectly sound, with all fittings—and with GREEN NETTING! Might be wise to advise the traffic department too.