Reporter's Diary

Press, 28 August 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Library AUCKLAND public libraries will have a “screamer” device installed to catch book thieves. The Auckland City Council has budgeted $32,000 for the devices for the 1979-80 financial year. The device is installed at exit doors and triggers a “screamer” if books tagged with a “bug” are taken through the doors without having been “debugged” when issued. Only a cross-sec-tion of books will be fitted with the “bugs” because of their cost. The Christchurch Public Library does not plan to introduce the system yet, according to the city librarian (Mr J. E. Stringleman). But the "screamers” may well be considered for the new library, which is expected to be opened in three years. Jogging mind AS MOST joggers know, the real problem is how to occupy the mind while you are forcing the body further and further. However much you try to plan the day’s work at the office or work out how your overdraft can be ' extended to meet your bills, you simply think, “How marvellous it will be when I stop.” In the

United States the problem of occupying the mind while the body wearily plods on has apparently been solved. In Los Angeles it is fashionable now to go jogging with your psychoanalyst. Californian businessmen are getting into the habit of making morning appointments with their lawyers or financial advisers for a skm discussion of pressing affairs. However no-one has yet seen a track-suited board meeting in progress around the parks. Deep sea SIR Winston Churchill, who avoided exercise, hated bully beef, and glorified the Battle of Britain, would have some perflexing moments in Britain today. The crew of a submarine named after him has been commended for its athletic zeal; the oncedreaded bully beef has become a most sought after commodity; and pilots from both sides of the Blitz are challenging Churchill’s his tory. Members of the crew of H.M.S. Churchill, nuclear submarine, are obsessive joggers who trudge up and down between the torpedo tubes while they are at sea. The “Churchill deep runners”

have been called the most enthusiastic entry in this year’s national “Run for Fun” in Hyde Park in October. “Hot 9 bully beef ACCORDING to legend, Sir Winston Churchill’s hatred of bully beef dated back to the Boer War and continued undimmed through two world wars. Like many another old soldier, he would find it hard to believe that in 1978 there is a thriving “hot” market in Britain for canned corned beef, the most despised of army rations. Truckloads of it have been disappearing or been hijacked from the highways, and countless tons more are stolen from warehouses and food stores. Not surprisingly, the soldiers most amazed at the “hot” bully-beef market are the men of Montgomery’s Desert Army, who ate countless tons of it and left a trail of comed-beef cans across Africa from Cairo to Tunis. As their monthly paper, “New Crusader,” put it “Thefts of bully on such a scale may be a source of wonder to World War II veterans who had to eat it sometimes for months on end.” Old enemies THE controversy over Sir Winston Churchill’s version of the Battle of Britain was given a lively airing when some of the sur-

viving “few” entertained their old enemies of the Luftwaffe in London recently. The affair was such a success from the start that, after welcoming rounds of drinks and lunch, they were 75min late for their next appointment at Uxbridge, where the Germans were shown the old wartime operations room. The upshot of a punishing weekend was a campaign by the old pilots to change the date of the turning point in the Battle of Britain from Churchill’s September 15, 1940, to August 18, which they agreed was the hardest day of the air war. One observer of the old enemies getting together after 38 years said that, for the British pilots, the only “contemporary laceration” was that they arrived in older, smaller cars while the Germans came in the latest Mercedes. Blood bank

A STACK of posters and enrolment forms from the North London Blood Transfusion Centre arrived at the Queen’s Theatre recently with a note appealing for blood donors among the theatre staff. Little did the transfusion centre know that the staff includes a certain Transylvanian count (alias George Chakiris) who is appearing in the theatre’s production of “The Passion of Dracula.” —Felicity Price