Reporter's Diary

Press, 7 May 1980, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Whodunnit? RESIDENTS of Greymouth and; more particularly, members of the Cobden Bowling Club in Greymouth, are puzzled about who was responsible for a peculiar event last week. Someone, it seems, put a goat inside the telephone box in the bowling club pavilion. Who put it there and how. they got it there remains a mystery. But the goat went misusing on the Saturday, and was not found until last Tuesday, when the women bowlers held their breakup at the club. In that period, the goat had devoured the Greymouth telephone directory to appease its hunger; and the women bowlers had some considerable difficulty in removing the goat from the telephone box, as the door opened inwards. It was a tight squeeze. In good faith AT the end of his sermon one Sunday morning recently, the priest at the St Albans parish church in Rutland Street solemnly asked his flock if they had seen anything-of the church candlesticks,' which had disappeared from the altar. “If anyone has seen the silver candlesticks or knows anything about them, would they please see that they are returned to their rightful place,” he told the congregation. When the service was over, one parishioner was noticed to be visibly pale and guilty-looking. He went up to the priest and made his confession. He was a second-hand dealer and he had realised when the priest mentioned the missing church candlesticks that he had bought those very same candlesticks from a customer that week. Little England. A BRITISH businessman, Mr Lewis Cartier, has announced plans to build a “Little England” amusement park in Florida, in the undeveloped hinterland r of Disney World and the Kennedy Space Centre. /According to his publicity material, he plans to spend $l2O million on constructing a scale model of Big

Ben, an oak-beamed English village, a Victorian seaside resort, a Norman castle, and a perfect copy of Stonehenge. There will even be a recreation of the Great Fire of London. Visitors will have a choice of transport — taxi, red double-decker bus, or pony and trap. Mr . Cartier promises that his fun fair will recreate a “typical British experience,” which has prompted one commentator in “The Times” to say that, in this case, “the ticket ' collectors at the door will be on permanent strike, the waitresses will be surly, the Norman castle will be closed every alternate Tuesday, the double deckers will run only on the other Tuesday, and the whole staff will tell visitors how absolutely awful the whole thing is and why don’t they go to Disneyland instead?” Road or rail ENERGY savings are the main argument in Sweden for suggesting a switched emphasis from road transr port to rail. If 17 per cent of the goods at present carried by road were instead to be carried by rail, the energy saved could be used to transport twice the present volume by 1990, a transport survey has shown. Interesting figures comparing road and rail haulage, and the relative energy costs of each, are shown in the survey .and could well be applied to New Zealand’s freight transnort system. The Swedish, railways, where 90 per cent of the freight is carried on electrified lines at present account for 42 per cent' of total transport work, yet consume only 8 per cent of the energy used for this purpose, the survey shows. Road haulage, by contrast, carries 58 per cent of goods but uses 92 per cent of the energy. The superiority of rail, it says, .is a result of the fact that electric locomotives have between double and five times the efficiency of the internal combustion engine. Lateness record VICRAIL the Victorian

Rail Authority, may reach the “Guinness Book of Records” for late-running trains — for the second time. Vicrail has already made the 1980 Australian supplement to the book for its 97 per cent record of running late. An instance of a Geelong-bound train which ran for two hours in two wrong directions before finally getting on the right track in March last year is being considered for the “Guinness Book of Rail Facts and' Feats.” The passenger train first went to Broadmeadows and back, then to St Albans and back, before setting off for Geelong two hours late.. The secretary of the Train Travellers’ Association, Mr Ken Mclntyre, let the Guinness people know of the lost train and has just heard that it is being considered for publication. Mr Mclntyre said, “In the railway world this mindboggling feat of incompetence and inefficiency is unbelievable. Express purpose A LARGE enema is displayed prominently among the' sale goods in the window of the U.F.S. Dispensary chemist’s shop. Beside'it is the price tag, “To clear: $3.50.”