RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31225, 24 November 1966, Page 30

RANDOM REMINDER

OVERSIGHTS

By tradition, professors are supposed to be dreamy, unworldly, absent-minded old duffers. The only professors we know are gimlet-eyed, practical men, who will pick up a packet on the stock exchange and knock off a hundred at billiards in 10 minutes before going off to display their undoubted erudition. Absent - mindedness belongs to us all. The day we remember to do absolutely everything we are supposed to do, the Fugitive will find that one-armed man. We all forget things, we all make mistakes. There was a delightful reminder of this in a letter from a man who is a friend of a clergyman, both of them being madly keen on .railways locomotives (steam). The curate was so keen, in fact, that he managed, after considerable difficulty, to make himself available for one of those excursion trips organised by a society of madly-keen railway enthusiasts. He went that morn-

ing to get the milk for his solitary breakfast, and while he was out, he searched the section and a considerable portion of the street for “The Press.” He had forgotten it was Sunday. But the curate’s friend who wrote to us confessed to an even more heinous crime. He is a man of great energy and personality, and, for him, a train trip is not a matter of a few hours between refreshment rooms and cat-naps. He is usually -armed with timetables, stop-watches, pencils and paper, and the friendship, won inevitably and swiftly, of the train crew. He was travelling from Auckland on the Limited and he was, of course, in the car next to the engine. He stayed awake until after Taihape —of course—but dozed off, and was awakened about Halcombe by a noisy group of returning school boarders. The car was deathly cold, and he groped his way, as he puts

it, with eyes full of sleep and cinders, to the steamheat control valve at the end of the car.

"More by touch than by sight,” he writes, “I seized a handle and pulled it down. There was a hiss whose volume was first satisfying, then alarming. The train ground to a halt, and the guard soon arrived, looking for the culprit, and there was I, standing dejected at the scene of the crime. The guard snorted at my explanation, but perked up at the name, which of course he took, with the address. ‘Any relation?’ he inquired. “The man himself,’ I shamefacedly replied. He told me after that the driver nearly fell off the engine laughing when he was told about it. He said he could make up time easily enough into Palmerston North, and that I’d hear no more about it. He did, and 1 didn't.

Except, of course, from the still small voice of conscience.