Reporter's Diary

Press, 22 December 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Rude awakening

LAST TUESDAY night, as most people will recall, was an especially warm one, and one Christchurch man spent it in fitful sleep on top of the bedcovers, wearing nothing but his watch. Upon awakening, he wandered into the kitchen in his birthday suit to have his morning cuppa when the doorbell rang. Forgetting his garb, or lack thereof, he opened the front door to be greeted by a once-a-month purveyor of religious tracts —- who was so startled that he dropped his handful of tracts and departed quickly down the footpath. Wvsfery items

TWO ITEMS — cement and stockings — on the list of payments made during the month mystified Kaiapoi borough councillors at their meeting this week. The Kaiapoi Town Clerk (Mr R. N. McCabe) was not sure about the cement. He said he thought it might have been for carpet. But he was definite about the stockings. Apparently a woman had come into the council office in great distress. Her nylons had been ruined after a fall caused by a hole at the corner of Smith and Williams Streets. “So we got her two pairs to make up,” he told councillors.

FIGHT like cat and dog? According to a Hororata man, that is just not true. He has a gundog, his wife has a Siamese cat. The dog finds rabbits, his owner shoots them, and the cat eats them. But now the system has a new twist. The occupier of a nearby property has a lot of dogs, and a rabbiter who also lives nearby provides a regular supply of hares for them to eat' So the Siamese cat has taken to roaming down the road to fetch some of the hares’ remains. Regularly, the cat has been bringing

home a hare leg or hare bone. But the cat doesn’t eat them — it gives ail the pieces to the gundog. City bird A BLUE BUDGIE has taken up residence in the offices of the North Canterbury Hospital Board’s accounting division in (Hereford Street. It flew in there yesterday morning, and in spite of a sign , put, up outside the building advertising the budgie’s whereabouts, nobody has claimed it. The board’s information officer (Mrs Pauline Hickson) says it is a very handsome budgie and is most tame. The staff hope that its owner will claim it today before the office closes for the Christmas holidays. Good cause

MEMLERS of the Tug Lyttelton Preservation Society have special grounds for hoping that their stall in Cathedral Square today will be a success. The stall is to give the people of Christchurch an opportunity to ’.earn something about the old coal-fired tug which the society is carefully restoring. The reason? The old tug blew two of her boiler tubes on her shakedown cruise at the start of the summer, leaving the society with no way to make money this summer and what the members fear will be a very big repair bill. They hope that the stall will recruit new financial members and members who will have spare week-end afternoons to work on the tug. If Christchurch does not rally round. Canterbury might lose the vessel that spent her working life at Lyttelton to (the shame of it) Auckland. Short work

A CHRISTCHURCH girl who travelled to London recently and found herself a job has written to friends in Christchurch

about her extraordinary short first day at work. She started the job, as a jjurnalist, at 9 a.m. on a Monday morning. At 10 a.m. everyone stopped work for a union meeting and by midday everyone was out on strike. Never too late NOT EVERYONE believes in telepathy, but a Hororata couple are starting to think it just might be possible. For some time, they had been discussing the fact that the husband had lost touch with all the members of his mother’s family. The husband, Mr Bob Grant, thought they would all be dead by now anyway, as it was such a long time since he had seen any of them. But he admitted wistfully that it would have been nice to have kept in touch. Then, one day last week, a Christmas card arrived irom a long-lost cousin, Dr W. Davidson, now living in Saskatchewan. Dr Davidson had found Mr Grant’s address in an old diary of his mother’s and had decided to write to his relative. The Grants are delighted Sometimes Mrs Grant said, it’s never too late, not even after 55 years. Confused ONE NIGHT recently, during the blitz on drunken driving, a Christchurch couple were spotted pushing their car in a small country town on the West Coast. A traffic officer appeared on the scene. The couple explained that they considered themselves too drunk to drive, and so they had decided to push. So drunk, in fact, that they were heading in the wrong direction, the officer pointed out to them, and quietly confiscated their keys. Hotel licence REGULAR patrons of the Darfield Hotel were somewhat surprise ’ recently when they received the hotel’s Christmas giveaways. They are plastic driver’s licence covers, with the following words on the front cover: “If you drink, don’t breathe.” —Felicity Price