Reporter's Diary

Press, 17 September 1976, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Puzzling

ONE of the subterfuges of the concert hall thoroughly puzzled one little chorister at the Christchurch Primary Schools’ Music Festival this week. ‘‘The audience starts clapping like mad,” she told her father, "and when they do this, Mr Willett (Mr L. B. Willett, the musical director) rushes off the stage and hides in this little passageway. But they don’t stop clapping, and after a while he comes out and makes us sing the second verse again.” Her father explained the convention of encores, but she still thought it “very peculiar” that Mr Willett should go away and hide where she could see him but the audience could not. Mr Chairman QUEENSLAND’S ultraconservative Premier, the New Zealand-bom Joh Bjelke-Petersen, says that no-one appreciates “Joh jokes” more than he does — even when they go against him. His favourite (related to a church conference): the Australian Leader of the Opposition (Mr Whitlam) died and went to heaven. St Peter told him to sit on his left side. The Prime Minister (Mr Fraser) died, and was told to sit on St Peter’s right side. When Joh Bjelke-Petersen died, he said to St Peter, “Get out of my chair.” 77te big ones THE monsters of the construction industry are lined up at the Ministry of Works and Development depot in Blenheim Road today ready for the annual South Island plant auction tomorrow. They come from Ministry projects all over the island, and include huge rollers, graders, cranes, D 8 crawler tractors and the big

10, 14 and 18 cubic yard dump waggons used on hydro dam sites.

Suspicious

A $lOO banknote was once accepted without question. But not any more, according to a man paid partly in cash for a car he sold yesterday. Presenting the pile of notes to a bank teller, he was surprised to see her leave her post (banknotes still on the counter) and whisper to a supervisor. She returned and began noting down the numbers of each $lOO note. “Just in case they are stolen,” she said significantly. Four cheques received no scrutiny at all.

Movies down south

WINTER exiles at the South Pole Station are now having to put up with the sort of thing the rest of us get on television all the time — reruns of elderly movies. Latest word from the big geodesic dome at the bottom of the world is that the last of the station’s 60 movies has now been screened (it was “The Brothers O’Toole”) and the reruns have started. Royal souvenir “ELIZABETH, Our Queen," a lavishly illustrated tribute to the monarch by Reginald Davis, is being promoted as a fitting souvenir of next year’s Royal visit to mark the twenty-fifth year of the Queen's accession to the Throne. Guess who

has been invited to write a foreword? Sir Keith Holyoake, of course.

Pepper or garlic?

“IF COUNCILLORS really want to know where the money goes,” said Waipara County Council’s County Clerk (Mr Tony McKendry) this week, “they should look at this account for goods collected from a Hawarden shop in the council’s name.” The account came to $319.50, and was for 450 “treated steaks”. Mr McKendry calculated that the order should have kept the employee who signed for it well fed for about 18 months. Lamb market

NEW-BORN lambs on Mr M. B. Ridgen’s property at Greendale have been reprieved from an untimely

end by being sold off as pets at a mere 75c each. The farm had an exceptional lambing this year, with 35 sets of triplets. Several of them were mis-mothered, so instead of letting them die, Mr Ridgen advertised them as pets and sold off 45 lambs — many of them to week-end farmers who own small blocks near the city. Rang a bell A YOUNG Christchurch couple who have decided on matrimony after a long period of considerations, were suddenly struck the other day by the irony of it all. They were writing out the wedding invitations at the time, and were so overcome by hysterical laughter at the circumstances that they nearly fell out of bed. —Garry Arthur