Reporter's Diary

Press, 3 February 1979, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

January skier

OSCAR Coberger, Christchurch’s noted mountaineer, who is well intp his 70s, reports that the ski season this year has already begun. He has just returned home after completing his fifty-first annual ski trip to Mount Cook, where he climbed the Hochstetter Dome and skied down from below the Hochstetter Shelf to the lower airstrip at the head of the Tasman Glacier. The slow climb and quick descent took him two days — January 30 and 31. “This is without doubt the opening of the ’79 ski season,” Mr Coberger said of his effort. “Mount Hutt a little later.” Chauffeur LAST MONDAY morning, a little, grey-haired grandmother from Wellington, who is visiting Christchurch on holiday, found herself at Christchurch Airport wearing nothing but a nightie and negligee, and in charge of a big American automatic car that she had no idea how to drive. The poor woman had been temporarily minding motels in the city, as well as baby-sit-ting her grandchildren, when she was called upon at a moment’s notice to take some motel guests to the airport to catch a plane because their taxi had failed to turn up. The

motel guests drove their big hired car to the airport, whereupon they leapt out, grabbed their baggage, and dashed into the terminal building, nearly missing their flight. This left the little old lady in the unenviable position of having to get her scantily clad self and the car back to the motel. She timidly asked the man in the car behind her if he could show her how to drive the thing. After he had recovered from the sight of her attire he gallantly fiddled with a few knobs and levers, started the car for her, and set her on her way. She got back to the motels all right, she reports, but she had to crane her neck all the way so that she could see over the car’s bonnet. More memories AN ITEM in yesterday’s “Diary” about Mr Tahu Hole, the former New Zealand journalist who has recently inherited about S3M from a British countess, has jolted the memory of a former school chum of Mr Hole’s. “I remember when he was at Sydenham School, and the teacher got very annoyed with him one day and told him that if his brains were in his backside he wouldn’t be able to sit down,” he said. “Tahu was in New Zealand for the school’s centenary a while ago. and we all had a good laugh with our old

teacher about this. It was especially ironical because Tahu, who was then working for the 8.8. C., was earning in a week a *arge part of what his poor old teacher was getting in a year.” Oasis? - f

AN AUSTRALIAN zoo director, Mr David Butcher, who visited Orana Park last week during his holiday in New Zealand, said that his zoo had conducted a survey recently. The Western Plains Zoo, which is on barren land 500 km west of Sydney, had given questionnaires to its visitors, asking them what animals were their favourites and what would they like to see most at the zoo. The majority replied that their favourite animals were polar bears and they would most like to see an aquarium with whales and dolphins. Unfortunately, said Mr Butcher, the desert-like temperatures at Western Plains would be enough to melt any polar bear, and the cost of the water — not to mention the whales and dolphins — in the middle of the desert would make an aquarium an impossibility. Trucking along TOMORROW afternoon, 26 enormous trucks will roil through the streets of Christchurch in convoy to promote a coming movie. The convoy, stretching over about two kilometres, will travel from the Showgrounds at 1 p.m. down Lincoln Road, around Hagley Park to Bealey Avenue

and then out to New Brighton and back to Cathedral Square. Fourteen of the “big rig” trucks — each with their 16-odd gears and some with as many as 18 wheels — will be parked in the Square for people to have a good look at them, while the “truckles” attend a preview of the movie “Convoy” which is being promoted by 3ZM. One of the biggest trucks in the film is a Black Mack, and one such truck will be part of Sunday’s convoy. It is s used by a private firm On the Haast route. In the pits

DURING AN unfair-dis-missal hearing in Britain, a shop girl’s bad language was described by her former boss as “pit language.” He would have done better to watch his own use of the language, since one member of the industrial tribunal was a miner. In the end, the tribunal ruled that the shop girl deserved $320 compensation for being dismissed simply because of her swearing.

Innocents abroad A REPORT in London’s “Daily Telegraph” newspaper tells of a conversation heard between two old ladies discussing a recent television appearance by Barry Humphries, alias Dame Edna Everage. “I do think she’s so brave going on television,” one of them said, “especially as she looks so masculine.” — Felicity Price