Reporter’s Diary

Press, 16 August 1976, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

Pooh is 50 THIS year is the fiftieth anniversary of that eminent bear of very small brain, Winnie the Pooh. His creator, A. A. Milne, has been dead for 20 years, but Pooh and the other leading characters — Piglet, Eeyore and Kanga — still live in glass cases in the office of their American publisher. And the boy who owned them, Christopher Robin, is now a 55-year-old bookseller in Dartmouth. Devon. “The Times” Diary correspondent, Alan Hamilton, journeyed to Devon to see Christopher R. Milne, and found him a shy, quietly humorous man who has spent the last 25 years in decent obscurity trying to live down his childhood. “1 do hope that there will be no more of these anniversaries,” Mr Milne said. “I thought I had removed the Christopher Robin millstone from my neck two years ago when I wrote it all down in a book.” With a certain amount of diffidence he agreed to be a judge in an anniversary competition run by his late father’s publishers, Eyre Methuen, in which children are invited to write a new '.turn for Pooh, for a prize of 12 jars of honey and £25 (about $5O). Costly smoke TWO Wellington men have drawn up a legal document which states that if one of them has a cigarette, he will have to pay $lOOO to the other. The wager was made on August 1, and the document is binding for ’an unspecified length of time. Torn notes A CITIZEN who had his $2 note rejected by a retailer because it had a thin strip torn off one end. asks how much damage a note can sustain and still be legal tender. A city bank manager says that there are five conditions which a bank note has to meet — it must still have the whole central statement about being' legal tender; it must have the signature of the Chief Cashier: it must have one series index (the “IK3” or something similar before the serial number): it must have one complete

serial number; and it must have at least part of the other series index or serial number. Notes which do not meet these conditions sent off to the Reserve Bank for a decision, and it is quite surprising how often the Reserve Bank gets both ends of one note from different sources. Vigilantes

IRATE citizens of Arrowtown banded together recently to put to flight what one resident described as “the übiquitous octopus of Dominion Breweries.” A gang of signerectors had arrived in Buckingham Street on a Tuesday morning, according to a letter to the “Mountain Scene,” to place a 6ft by ’ 4ft illuminated sign on the roof of one of the town’s two hotels. A local businessman was first on the scene, and held the line until reinforcements arrived, which they did — in good measure. One said the sign was “of suitable dimensions and vulgarity to beckon the faithful from at least as far away as the top ridge of the Remarkables.” Unfortunately it did not comply with the borough council ordinance as to size and suitability for Arrowtown’s special commercial zone. ‘'Kaffir"’ is rude EVEN the South Africans, for all their petty apartheid, have some qualms about using derogatory terms for black citizens. A Supreme Court judge in Pietermaritzburg has ruled that calling a black man a “Kaffir" is an illegal assault on his dignity. He rejected a definition in a 1933 edition of the Oxford Dictionary which said Kaffir was not an insulting term. “It is remarkable how quickly the meaning of words changes,” he said. “I am certain that the word has taken on another meaning over the years, and that today a member of the Bantu race would be insulted if you called him a Kaffir.” He awarded Mr Delase Ciliza $lBO damages and costs for being thus insulted by a policeman, overturning an earlier decision by a Magistrate who refused damages to Mr Ciliza. The case arose from a heated incident in a Durban street.

Concorde club IN THE six months that the droopy-nosed Concorde has been in commercial service, nearly 6000 passengers have flown supersonically, according to British Airways. When they counted up at the end of July, 3578 passengers had flown in the Concorde to and from Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and 2410 to and from Washington. Load factors on the Washington ; route exceed 93 per cent I (they don’t say what the I load factor is on the Bah- I rain route) and aircraft in . both directions are fully booked until next month. A third aircraft on the Washington route is to be added on October 5. Grounded MEANWHILE, the first British-built prototype, Concorde 002. has gone on display at the Fleet Air Arm Museum, Yeovilton, Somerset, where it will be preserved by the Science j Museum. In its seven-year : career from its first flight, on April 9. 1969. at Filton, to its last trip to Yeovilton, 002 made 439 flights, Including 173 hours and 26 minutes at supersonic speeds. It takes its place at Yeovilton beside such historic predecessors as the Schneider Trophy-win-ning Supermarine S6B, the Alcock and Brown Vickers Vimy, and the Gloster E2B/39 with the Whittle engine. Marx ousted THE LATE Dame Agatha Christie, author of innumerable mysteries, has overtaken the even later Karl Marx to become the world's second most translated author. Lenin is still first, according to U.N.E.S.C.O.’s survey, and the Bible is still the world’s most translated book. Pip pip PUMPKIN lore is being accumulated at an encouraging rate. An anonymous pumpkinologist nowclaims that there used to be a variety called horse j pumpkins, next of kin to I the ones that the sheep \ and cattle used for shelter i down south. One season, a i shipment of these outsize ) pumpkins was sent to ■ Alaska during a shortage of igloos, says our infor- i mant. They were also re- j quisitioned as loos (a • warmer kind of igloo) for a picnic race meeting. —Garry Arthur