Reporter's Diary

Press, 17 August 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Behind the times A BROCHURE issued in America to tourists intending to visit New Zealand has fallen into the hands of a Christchurch woman, and she is highly amused about its description of the Garden City. She knows two people who are going on the tour, and who will arrive in Christchurch next month for a two-day stop. According to the brochure: “Christchurch is a bit of Britain, complete with a Canterbury Cathedral, an Avon River and applecheeked students in bowlers and boaters.” Racing stock A FATHER and his two sons will all ride at the Oamaru Jockey Club’s meeting on Monday. The father is Graeme Mein,

who lives at Yaldhurst and mixes taxi-driving with a race-riding career. The two sons are Michael and Phillip. Michael is an experienced jockey and has had many successes on South Island courses, but Phillip will be riding at his first totalisator meeting. Paul Mein, a third son, recently joined the racing staff of “The Press.” Weight-lifter ONE OF THE women on the roster of volunteers to help with the local ambulance service in a country town not far from Christchurch is still glowing with pride at her unexp e c t e d victory for Women’s Lib. last week. She accompanied the volunteer ambulance driver on an emergency call to a house in the town, but

they found that the woman who had to be taken to hospital was too heavy for them to lift. The ailing woman’s husband, who was in his seventies, gallantly offered to help them lift the stretcher into the ambulance, so they decided to give it a try. Imagine the woman volunteer’s amazement when the two men picked up a handle each at one end leaving her to manage the other. She tells us that she was suitably spurred on by such a challenge, and bore the weight admirably. Briefed MR ARTHUR Ivory, the Christchurch man whose hobby is abbreviations, and who was mentioned in the Diary last month, has been taught some new diminutions for his list. Yesterday, he took some of the sailors from ’the U.S.S. Horne out to morning coffee, and they told him about two abbreviations which, they said, were very popular 'in their Navy — F.T.N. (“Fun Time Navy”) and N.A.V.Y. (“Never Again Volunteer Yourself’). Honesty A CHRISTCHURCH woman who was in the city shopping with her mother on Tuesday tells us she is overjoyed that honesty is not dead. She stopped her car outside the Municipal Electricity Department, to pay the power bill, and handed her mother a change purse containing $2O to buy meat at the butcher’s shop across the road. When the two met back at the car, however, the mother had to confess that when she got into the butcher’s shop the change purse was nowhere to be found. They searched inside and around the car, but it had disappeared. Saddened, they drove off and did some more shopping, in town and then in Sydenham, and went on to Princess Margaret Hospital, where they were going to visit Dad. Just as the

woman was about to lock the car, she happened to glance at the windscreen and there was the purse, still containing $2O, tucked under the windscreen wipers. Some honest soul had picked it up off the footpath outside the M.E.D. and tucked it under the wiper. The two women had been driving around for an hour or so, and it was still there. Calls on credit IN THIS modem world, where plastic is fast replacing cash as a means of payment, credit cards can buy almost anything — even perhaps a telephone call from a public booth. The British Post Office is considering scrapping thousands of coin-operated public telephones and replacing them with phones worked by credit cards. The cards, made of stiff plastic, would be bought in advance from post offices and shops in a varying range of values. A card would be used repeatedly until its value was used up. Weather hare A HARE in the village of Noviazka, in the Soviet Union thumps on a tree stump to warn residents that rain is imminent. The hare’s weatherforecasting gift is said to be “100 per cent reliable.” The villagers, who adopted the “weather hare’’ several years ago, and who feed it carrots, noticed that rain fell every time the animal thumped a tree stump with his hind legs. In memoriam NO FEWER than 12 memorial notices for Elvis Presley have been published in Christchurch — to mark the first anniversary of his death. One of those printed in “The Press” expressed eternal gratitude for the pleasure of his music which "lives on hour after hour.” Another fan went so far as to write a long poem for a memorial message which ends: "So he may be gone to God’s bed. But his memory lingers in our head.”