Reporter’s Diary

Press, 23 February 1977, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

Royal treatment

MOSQUITO-BITTEN members of the press party travelling with the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh on their tour through the Pacific found an unexpected ally in Her Majesty, it was revealed yesterday. While in the Pacific Islands several members of the large British press contingent suffered through their unaccustomed exposure to the buzzing biters. The Queen, on noticing their mottled and swollen features, inquired as to the reason and made arrangements for the bitten to be treated aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia by her own surgeon, Captain N. Blacklock. Half-baked? CRUMBLING brickwork on the George Forbes Memorial Library is the latest in the continuing series of problems Lincoln College is having with its new buildings. Bricklayers at. the top of a high scaffold on the eastern wall of the nine-storey building tell the tale. They are replacing the worstaffected bricks but. as yet, no-one knows what is causing the problem. The upper storeys are less than three years old, and it is in these more recent additions to the building that the bricks are flaking. Sorry, but. ..

A CABINET Minister has acknowledged for the first time that there have been incidents of compulsory sterilisation in the Indian Government’s family planning programme, “Forgive us for our past mistakes and we will be careful in the future,” the Minister of Defence (Mr Bansi Lal) told a political rally in Northern Haryana this week. “The Government apologises to the masses for compulsory sterilisation. Never in the future will any compulsion be allowed to be used for the purpose of family planning, he said. Mr Lal A

blamed the incidents on “over-zealous officials” seeking to implement the family planning programme. Condolences

POPE PAUL has sent a message of condolence to the Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr Donald Coggan) after the death of the Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Dr Janani Luwum. The message, signed by the Vatican Secretary of State (Cardinal Jean Villot) said: “His Holiness Pope Paul VI shares your deep sorrow at the tragic death of a great pastor of the Anglican Communion. He prays for Christ’s consolation for yourself, fellow bishops, the Ugandan flock, and all Anglican faithful in this sad moment.” Marriage, blues A SISTER’S wedding became something of a nightmare for one young man of our acquaintance. He lives in Christchurch; his family at Mount Somers. The wedding, too, was at. Mount Somers. A fortnight ago he prepared himself — borrowed suit and all — to travel to the wedding, in company with a friend he had called on to assist in the celebra* tions. An eleventh-hour telephone conversation just before he travelled south revealed he had his dates wrong: he was a week early. Rearrangements were made and he and his friend arrived finally at the proper place and on the proper date. Half an hour before the wedding party (of which he was a member) was due to leave for the church, he donned his borrowed suit. Somehow the legs of the trousers had grown three inches since he had tried the suit on a fortnight previously. Somehow, too. he had left his shoes in Christchurch, In borrowed shoes and in trousers with the legs taped up inside, he survived the ceremony end subsequent celebrations. It

cannot happen again, he said; he has only one sister.

Siapoleon's revenge THE Duke of Wellington, eighth holder of the title created for the man who beat Napoleon at Waterloo, is nursing a broken ankle received in an accident which he said would “make the shade of my great predecessor red with shame.” He was exercising his dog in the woods when he stumbled on a bramble bush and broke his ankle, which is now in a plaster cast. “That wouldn’t have been so bad,” he said, “but the dog’s name is Napoleon.” Shades of iNessie?

PERHAPS the proprietors of a Colombo Street record shop know something we don't. In a window display of records of bagpipe music and Scottish airs, to take advantage of the recent pipe band championships, they have a suitably clad figure in tartan. But the face of the stand-in Scot is distinctly green. Do genuine Scots pipers blow until they're green in the face, instead of blue? Or is it meant to represent the creature from the loch? Leading light ALTHOUGH the former British Prime Minister, Sir Harold Wilson, is no sailor, a sailing ship and a lighthouse decorate his new coat of arms. The coat of arms, announced this week, is a shield supported by two lions and topped by the crossed pen and spade of the British Labour Party. Sir Harold Wilson became entitled to arms when he was made a Knight of the Garter on his resignation last. year. The arms, designed by the five-centuries-old College of Arms, show’s the Bishop Rock lighthouse, in the English Channel Isles of Scilly, where Sir Harold has a holiday cottage, and the ship represents his honorarv appointment to Trinity House, a venerable institution concerned with navigation.