Reporter's Diary

Press, 22 February 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Deadly cargo AIRPORT officials at Calcutta were taking no chances when Qantas landed 69 head of cattle there recently. As part of any normal animal charter operation the crew is required to be equipped with a “humane killer,” a device designed to kill an animal quickly and painlessly should it take

ill on the flight. Unfortunately, whoever made out the aircraft's manifest left the “e” off the end of “humane”. The Indian officials were not impressed when they learned the truth. Mint note ONE of the old £5O notes, now valued at £ll5

(about $218), is the major New Zealand item in Stanley Gibbons’s auction of paper money in London on March 7. The red note was issued by the Reserve Bank between 1956 and 1966, and is considered rare because of its uncirculated condition. It is engraved with a portrait of Captain Cook and a drawing of a ship. Stanley Gibbons’s publicity sheet calls it a Portuguese ship, adding the historical note that it was the Portuguese who “first sighted the island.” We, of course, know better. Or at least, if the Portuguese navigators did get here before Abel Tasman, they forgot to tell anyone. On the face of it, it would seem to have been a good idea to put aside an occasional £5O note and reap the benefit 21 years later. Not so, says our commercial department. Just to keep up with inflation, the note would have to be worth more than $4OO today. “It is never worth hanging on to money,” say the specialists. Mouths of babes CONFUSION at Wellington Airport the other day led one child to ask a parent: “Which turmoil do we leave from?” Steam or sail? OCTOBER mail from Britain continues to arrive in Christchurch in dribs and drabs, causing more than one reader to observe that the postal sendee has now gone full circle. A card posted in London on October 11 did not get here until February 20. The four months and nine days is the time taken by the more sluggish of the old sailing ships. So while air travel gets faster and faster — little more than a day and a night from Christchurch to London — surface transport gets slower and slower. In its heyday, shipping could get a letter from one side of the world to the other in about six weeks. With the decline in world shipping, the problem is likely to get worse. Experts SERGEANT K. T. Box le seemed unsure when Mr Barry Atkinson asked him in the Magistrate’s Court yesterday whether the Do-

minion Hotel had had to remodel its interior to get rid of a certain rough element. Was it not true, Mr Atkinson went on, that lawyers who frequented the hotel had begun to leave because they were meeting too many of their clients in the bar? When Sergeant Boyle signified that he knew nothing much about that, Mr Atkinson promised that he could produce plenty of expert witnesses to prove the point. Home closed THE ELDERLY residents of Cressy House, Lyttelton, have an interesting time. They have an annual fancy-dress party which is the talk of the old people’s homes for miles around, and each February they are taken away for a summer holiday. Mrs June Collett, the matron, closed Cressy House today, to escort 13 elderly residents off to Akaroa for a 10-day holiday. Their ages range from 60 to 90, and one old lady has a wheelchair with her to enable her to make an eagerly' awaited annual shopping expedition. They will stay at a motel, and the Lyttelton Rotary Club will bring them back at the end of their stay. Five other residents of Cressy House will have their holiday with relatives instead. Deaf ear SOMEONE’S hearing aid must have been switched off when we were given the list of tenants in the old High Street Chambers, which will be demolished soon to make way for a new building. Our frontpage story named Hanafins Hearing Aid Centre as one tenant, but that centre is at 136 Hereford Street. The firm’s “audio rooms”, where testing is done for airline pilots and others needing regular tests, are in the High Street Chambers, however. Bad for them THE QUOTE of the week must surely be the Australian Government’s explanation for refusing to allow Pan American to cut its Pacific return air fare by $lO9. The cheaper fare, said the Government, was “not in the public interest.” — Garry Arthur