Reporter’s Diary

Press, 27 January 1978, Page 2

Reporter’s Diary

Savings AN all-out effort seems under way by the New Zealand Hockey Association to save money, to ensure that a New Zealand hockey team will be able to go to Moscow to defend its Olympic gold medal. One of New Zealand’s best-known hockey players, Selwyn Maister, who was a member of the gold medal team at Mexico. was married at the week-end. Among the telegrams of congratulation read out at the reception was one from the association. Those at the wedding, many of them associated with hockey, listened appreciatively then dissolved into laughter. Somehow the telegram had been sent “collect.” a fact that did not escape the best man’s attention as he read it out. Unsuitable LOCAL lawyers might wonder if a precedent exists for a ruling made in the High Court of Malaysia’s Perak state this week. The iudge ordered a lawver, instead of his c’ient. to pav for the costs of an unsuccessful civil suit against a lorry driver for the death of the client’s husband in a road accident. Mr Justice Hashim Sani dismissed the damages suit and said that the lawver, David Alfred, must nay the costs because he should have explained to his client the true nosition of the case instead of “giving her false hopes.” The iudge said that from all the evidence it was clear that there could never have been any room for doubt that the suit would fail. Sunnressant SMOKERS who feel their life is beginning to lack a little something might be given an incentive to ston smoking by the news of recent research. In the latest issue of a magazine called “Medical Aspects of

Human Sexuality,” Dr Alton Ochsner writes that people who give up smoking achieve an increased libido and sexual drive. He does not make it clear, however, whether smoking will reduce the frustrations of those who find inadequate outlet for their libidos as it is. Or trees . . . STAFF at Guthrey’s New Zealand Tours in Cashel Street might contemplate their own tree-top sit-ins in future. For some years their cafeteria and the window of the men’s lavatory overlooked a view all too common in the concrete jungle: brick walls, rusted iron roofs, drainpipes, vents, and various chimney stacks. But this was softened by two silver birch trees, selfsown, in a cul-de-sac between their building and the Christchurch City Council’s Lichfield Street parking building. Recently the raucus sound of a chain saw galvanised the office into action in defence of the trees. Broom, bracken, and various broadleaf trees had already been felled but the two silver birch still remained. The man behind the power saw said his instructions were to fell them, too, because the leaves blew into the carpark. Negotiation continued and the trees were saved. An imitation treeprotection order was drawn up by the staff and affixed to the trees. All seemed secure until apparently word got about that ail the tree-lovers were tree-perching in the North Island; during the lunch hour last Friday some-one armed with a hand-saw surreptitiously felled the two silver birches.

. . . and leaves DIFFERENCES of opinion between neighbours are not uncommon, and it is to prevent any aggravation of one of these that the letter io this column from a reader is published

without her name and address. The woman writes: “The Bible tells us to forgive those that trespass against us and to love they neighbour as thyself. Dear God, I find it hard to like all my neighbours, let alone love them. On a hot nor’west day I am grateful that Nature provided trees to fan and shade; not so my neighbour who carefully picks up every leaf. She has just collected a brown paper bag of them, walked round the block, and thrown them all over my clean front porch. I have swept them up — to mulch a tree.” Poet’s pistols HOT on the heels of Burns night come the news that the Burns cottage museum at Alloway, near Ayr, has been given Robert Burns’s duelling pistols. The museum had tried to buy them when they went on sale at a Johannesburg auction last September but was outbid by an expatriate Scotsman now farming in South Africa. But the farmer, Mr W. H. Fleming, who bought the pistols for $5500, has now decided to give them to the museum. The museum’s trustees are most grateful, but still have not solved the mystery of how they came into Burns’s possession. There is no doubt that they were his, but whether Burns bought them to achieve social status or whether they were a gift to him from an admirer of is works is not known. Too subtle

READERS will recognise the name A. K. Grant as a by-line which appears occassionally in “The Press.” Mr Grant also has a weekly satirical column in the “Listener,” but is beginning to wonder whether he is being too subtle in his form of satire. He often “invents” people, places, and organisations — shadows of the real ones at which he is poking fun — and in a recent column also carefully invented several book titles. (The inventions were very careful since

the possibility of an “invention” turning out to be a real book are surprisingly high). Even so, he has since had a letter from an Auckland bookstore, telling him of a customer who came in asking for one of the “books” he had named. When the shop assistant and then the shop manager both pleaded ignorance of any such title, the customer triumphantly produced Mr Grant’s column from the “Listener” to “prove” his point. Look alike

THE happiest man in the Northern Territory (Australia) town of Katherine is a middle-aged, solidly built Darwin family man spending the week in town on business. He looks just like a photograph of one of the most wanted men in South-East Asia, a photograph carried in the pockets of 50 policemen for two days. Seven times during Monday and Tuesday this week he was pounced on by police mistaking him for the now-captured Donald Tait, the pilot convicted in Indonesia of drug smuggling and alleged in Australia to be a drug runner. But until Tait was finally captured, the respectable businessman was a harried man indeed. On one occasion he was bundled into a police car and taken to the Katherine police station for intensive questioning. He had been seized bv a highranking police officer who was convinced he had cantured Tait. In fact, the description and head-and-shoulders photograph of Tait issued to Katherine police proved to be one of the more misleading factors in the two-day search started when a light plane was forced down near the township last Sunday. The photograph was several years old and Tait had changed, putting on weight to be 20 stone. One police officer went so far as to say (after Tait had been caught) that if the nilot had walked up to him in the street and offered to give himself up. he would have told him to go away.