Reporter’s diary

Press, 9 May 1983, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Official verse

THE MINISTRY of Transport would not win a prize for poetry, judging by the following effort on the cover of its “Directory of Key Personnel and Statutory and Non-Statutory Bodies”: “In the Ministry of Transport, we speak of many things; of cars and ships and lifts and rain, and things that fly with wings.” Too tough

NOT EVERYONE in Mexico is enamoured of the tough new austerity measures introduced by the country’s president, Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado. A Mexican provincial newspaper recently carried the pleading headline: “Enough of realism — let’s get back to promises.” Where from?

A READER feels that we might not be making the most overseas of fish with the odd -dame, orange roughy. Big quantities of orange roughy are

already being exported and its eating qualities have been highly praised, especially in the United States. Our reader told friends in California, keen fish eaters, that they must try orange roughy from New Zealand. They could not find the. fish on sale anywhere, however, and it was only after some time that they eventually found some tucked away in a supermarket freezer. The fish was very good, they said, but there was no sigh on the package that it was from New Zealand. The reader feels that we should “push our own barrow” a little more. Waste not ... HOW OFTEN is a tin man suit required? That was what the Rangiora Dramatic Society thought after it had staged “The Wizard of Oz” last year, and so the tin man suit was sold to a costume hire - shop. This year, the play to tour North Canterbury during May is “The Adventures of Awful Knawful,” and one of the costumes needed is' —

you’ve guessed it — a tin man suit. The society now has to hire the suit back.

Poor turn-out

CONSIDERING the difficulties of the job market, the University of Otago’s “Newsletter” is surprised by the poor response from students to a series of lunch-time lectures on the theme of “finding a job”. The biggest attendance was 30. House whine CLEMENT FREUD has tabled a motion in the House of Commons deploring the “surreptitious means by which mediocre South African wine has been sneaked into the cellars of the House," and noting “the reticence with which it is being marketed.” The South African wines, he says, “are being peddled like dirty postcards. They do not appear on the Refreshment Department’s wine list. Whenrthey are sold it is like someone shuffling up and saying: ‘Do you want my sister’.”