Reporter's Diary

Press, 4 July 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Set alight

WHEN a Motueka policeman arrested a Motueka youth for pillaging the Queen’s mail after breaking into a bus depot, he had no idea how closely the offence was likely to affect him. The youth, who was convicted on a pillaging charge a few days after the break-in had put a match to the pile of registered mail on finding no cash inside any of the envelopes. But the policeman did not ascertain until several days later that among the charred mail was his own pay packet along with the pay cheques of several other Motueka policemen and traffic officers. Band of hope WHEN the National Band of New Zealand reaches i Britain in August, during i its world tour, it hopes to | inspire the New Zealand | cricket team to a test win ' against England. This ! week, the 52 members of J the band and the 20 members of the Aotearoa Maori Group will leave to tour North America and Europe, and will return in October. Mr J. Rafferty, the assistant band manager for the tour, says he is confident that the band and its music will add enough impetus to the cricket team’s test-match play to ensure a win.

Warmer WE HEARD yesterday that the classrooms at Christchurch Girls’ High School have been much warmer in the last day or two since someone arrived to fix the heating system. The girls in some classrooms had last week shivered through studies in temperatures sometimes below sdeg. Communication gap AMERICANS and. Britons will not be able to understand one another in 200 years time, according to the world’s acknowledged authority on English. Mr Robert Burchfield, chief editor of the Oxford English dictionaries, says language differences between the two .countries have been steadily growing since the American colonists kicked out the British in 1776. He says that vocabulary, and not accent, will be the main stumbling block to communication across the Atlantic. Part of the blame for the language drift lies with British academics who have refused to have any dealings with American English, Mr Burchfield says. British English has kept its ancient character while American English has changed. Mr Burchfield says he rejects the ancient belief that there should be only one form of English,

Plant hotel THE CITY of Sheffield, in Yorkshire, believes it has the world’s first plant hotel. For 80c a week, plant owners can go away on holiday secure in the knowledge that their house plants are being looked after by experts rather than ” unwilling neighbours.