Reporter’s diary

Press, 12 March 1985, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

The wood turkeys EVENINGS such as Sunday, when the sky is a darker blue and the first autumn chills creep through the still air, are those that the wood turkey waits for all year. For months beforehand, sometimes from spring or early summer, he has been trundling in from the countryside with trailer creaking under loads of firewood. The great cache of wood that accumulates has to be burnt before the end of winter, otherwise there will be no room for more, so all fires are blazing at the slightest excuse. The wood turkey is a different breed from the person who gathers firewood when necessary, rather than buy coal. His wood-gathering operation is of military proportions, meticulously planned, involving the whole family and occupying every spare day. Children who are old enough are pressed into service carrying wood to the high-sided tandem trailer. Those who are not have a long picnic. Almost every afternoon about 4 p.m., winter or summer, a stream of wood turkeys can be seen returning to Christchurch up

the Main South Road from the firewood plantations of Burnham and Dunsandel. In the advanced stages, firewood gathering can become an obsession. We knew of a man in South Canterbury who took a trailer and chainsaw every time he went outside the town boundary, day or night. Eventually, the stacks of firewood on his section grew so massive that he had to hire ground elsewhere for more stacks (a wood turkey never, never, sells any firewood). For the true wood turkey, it will not matter if open fires are eventually banned altogether. He will still collect wood, whether it is burned or not. Void THE PRIME MINISTER, Mr Lange, is a man who obviously relishes public speaking, but even he gets tangled up sometimes. He said in a radio interview yesterday morning that someone’s verbal agreement was not worth the paper it was written on. Retrieved

SOMETIMES swinging the lead pays off. An otherwise highly-efficient Christchurch nurse, who would rather do anything than swot for her approaching hospital final examinations, was soothing her conscience by working instead in the garden of her Riccarton flat. In a big clump of freshly-pulled weeds, she saw what looked like a beer can top. It was a treasured silver ring that she had lost in the garden more than six months before. The animate chair THE DAY WAS when noone thought it unusual to say “chairman” when the incumbent in the chair was a woman. That was before the women’s movement insisted that such a use was sexist. Then there was a brief time when “chairwoman” was used, after which came “chairperson.” The struggle for equality and neutrality in the chair is continuing, and we are pleased to announce that the Public Service Association has a new approach. It refers to Mrs Marion Bruce as the “chair" of the Wellington ifospital Board. Since the variations are pretty

well exhausted, we hope that puts an end to it. Newspapers “NEWSPAPERS are read at the breakfast and dinner tables. God’s great gift to man is appetite. Put nothing in the paper that will destroy it” ... W. R. Nelson, publisher of the “Kansas City Star.”

Forced purchase A MEMBER of the official party at a Canterbury wedding at the week-end is grateful for Saturday shopping. Having forgotten to pick up his own suit from the dry cleaner’s on Friday, the only solution was to tramp the shopping centres on Saturday morning to buy a new one. When he finally found a suit of reasonable appearance and approximate fit, the trousers were too long. His wife took up the cuffs just in time to make the happy occasion, but, as the Duke of Wellington said, “It was a damned close-run thing.”

Diogenes on display

A MAN in Plymouth, England, is refusing to hand over a corpse to health authorities for burial because he wants to keep it in his library. Robert Lenkiwiecz, a painter, wants the body of a local tramp, Edwin McKenzie, to be embalmed, coated in acrylic, and displayed naked in his library as a reminder of life’s great mysteries. Mr McKenzie, who was named Diogenes by Mr Lenkiewicz, lived in a barrel at a rubbish tip. He died six weeks ago, aged 72. Mr Lenkiewicz envisages the corpse’s future role as “something like a large paperweight,” but the Plymouth Council is having none of it. It has invoked the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act, 1984, and is threatening Mr Lenkiewicz with legal action. “Mr Lenkiewicz assures us that displaying corpses in people’s homes is a custom round the world, in places such as Mexico or Italy,” said the city’s health officer, Mr Michael Fox. “This is not Mexico or Italy. This is Plymouth.” Mr Lenkiewicz might have to look elsewhere for a paperweight. f —Peter Corner