Reporter’s Diary

Press, 7 August 1976, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

< Ready to pay POWER supply authorities might be surprised at how far people are prepared to go in conserving energy. About two-thirds of the 80 persons attending the Environmental V .nguard Organisation’s recent seminar on the subject indicated that they would favour raising the price of electricity to reflect true . costs, and readjusting the J tariff so that larger users of domestic electricity paid more. Sir Malcolm Burns had asked the seminar: “If there is a desire to defer nuclear power in New Zealand as long as possible, what single sug- ' gestion would each of the panel make for better energy conservation and planning now?” Most said that domestic and spaceheating load should be shifted from electricity and to achieve that a restructured tariff should reflect the true costs of generating electric power. Other suggestions were that natural gas should be piped from the North Island and that more effort should go into solar water-heating. ‘"Nipper opera'' THE NEWEST tenant of the Christchurch Arts Centre is Mr Leslie Trowbridge, who has brought his puppet opera up from Dunedin. He is awaiting council approval to use a room at the centre for his puppet show, and in the meantime is giving performances of Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” in the Canterbury Museum Theatre. Mr Trowbridge trained as an opera singer when he was a young man in Long Wittenham. near Oxford, England, but had to give up and garry on farming after his mother died. He’s a keen opera lover, and has a big collection of records, which are the basic material for his puppet show — inspired by the Salzburg Marionette Tneatre which he once saw in London. Mr Trowbridge has made 32 rod puppets of plastic pipe and sponge rubber, dressed in costumes which he designed and sewed himself. He knows the action of each opera intimately, and manipulates the characters as the music plays. He calls it "The Nipper Opera.” “.If” Hets there WOULD the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament have displayed its model nu-

clear missile with such confidence yesterday if its leaders had known what my spies reported — the presence in Cathedral Square only minutes beforehand of Mr Paul Molineaux, the new head of the Security Intelligence Service. He was seen prowling the precinct with a black hat pulled well down over his eyes, and wearing a large overcoat capable of harbouring any number of bugging devices. And what about that tightly-furled umbrella—a directional microphone? Roller derby SANTA MARIA avenue, on the hill behind McCormack’s Bay, will be closed to traffic most of today — a good job too. Daredevil cubs' and scouts will be tearing down the hill all day on soapbox carts in the Rapanui District Scout Association’s annual Roller Derby. About 30 boys have entered. Their carts will be checked before they push off to make sure that they have tiller or wheel steering (not ropes), and brakes that will stop them on the hill. They have not had a serious injury yet, just a few scrapes and bruises, but they will 'have the Red Cross disaster team standing by at the bottom of the quarter-mile course, just in case. Carts can reach 35 to 40 m.p.h. on the chosen route, so crash-hats are mandatory.

Children's play PADDINGTON Bear is being groomed by the Canterbury Children’s Theatre for performance in the August school holidays. The producers feel lucky they’ve got him, too, because they tried to get the rights to the play for years without any success. They knew that a professional theatre group has presented a “Paddington Bear” play in London, but whenever they inquired they were told it was not available to amateur companies. But a bit of publicity in Britain did the trick. The British Children’s Theatre Association recounted some of the Canterbury group’s activities in its newsletter, and it was read by the playwright, Alfred Bradley, who wrote offering the use of some of his plays, including, by a happy coincidence, “The Adventures of a Bear Called Paddington”. The scripts and performing rights arrived in good time for f he group to open the play in Christchurch on Friday, August 20. Orange aid

THE SCALES sometimes seem weighted against the poor customer in these days of transition from Imperial measure to metrics. Oranges in one suburban fruit shop are ticketed in cents per lb, but priced out by the shopkeeper in cents per kilo. “That’s not very good for the customer, is it?” asked one confused shopper, "The customer doesn’t have to worry about that,” the [fruiterer assured him. “We’ll sort that out."

All the eights NUMBER eight has been a number Mr John Hutton, of Harewood Road, has not been able to ignore. He was born in Scotland on the eighth day of the eighth month, 1888. And tomorrow his number comes up again — he’ll be 88. Mr Hutton came to New Zealand in 1926, and took a job driving a team of horses at Methven. Later he farmed at Swanannoa, near Oxford, until he retired to Christchurch 24 years ago. Mysterious OVERHEARD from a group of matrons outside a city supermarket: “Well, really, I don’t know — I haven’t been able to find anyone who voted for him.” — GARRY ARTHUR