Reporter’s diary

Press, 3 October 1985, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Spring

THE DAFFODILS in the front yard of a St Albans house were in full bloom yesterday. This is happening all over town. But this garden presented an unusual sight. The entire space was filled with daffodils—a more inventive way to keep from mowing the lawn for a while than the usual covering of bark dust. Eighteen months ago, the homeowners saw an advertisement for daffodil bulbs and ended up buying 1000. In November, they mow over the yard and tidy it up so that it becomes lawn for the rest of the year. Spring has announced itself in a different way at Te Anau. The season’s first shining cuckoo was reported recently. Cuckoos winter over in the Solomon Islands. Local grey warblers will not be so pleased to see this sight of spring, since their nests are usually taken over by the cuckoos. The first cuckoo in the township was heard in a tree outside Fiordland National Park headquarters. Noddying off GROANS from a Christchurch City Council committee room the other day had nothing to do with council policy but a lot to do with the way some councillors play with words as the day wears on. Cr Clive Cotton had asked about the Noddy train’s licence fee in the New Brighton Mall. No-

body knew the fee. Cr Geoff Stbne suggested that someone should “put their Big Ears to the ground and find out.” First groan. Councillors decided that council officers should sort it out. Cr Stone was not satisfied: “We don’t want to leave this Mr Plodding along, you know.” Second, and louder, groan.

Waker-upper

WINTER is over, and the early morning is getting lighter, much to the relief of a Christchurch woman. A street-cleaning machine with its flashing lights regularly comes down the street outside her bedroom window. It makes enough noise as it is, but that is not what wakes her up. The machine drives her cat, which sits on the window ledge, wild. The cat’s hissing and yowling wakes her up much too early. Things are somewhat better now that the machine’s flashing lights are not used. Even so, the cat’s commotion is enough to startle her awake. Centaurus

RECENT stories about passenger flying-boats have sparked a few memories. A Centaurus Road resident remembers the landing of the Centaurus, the first flyingboat to come to the South Island, on Lyttelton Harbour in 1938. The Centaurus, an Imperial Airways airliner, was surveying routes through to New Zealand. Eventually, Centaurus Road—the old Port Hills Road—was named after it. Captain John Burgess, the' Eilot, had been born in •unedin and had spent many years in Lyttelton. He had never dreamed that he would one day taxi a plane to a mooring near Gladstone Pier. Later, he was the first pilot of the first Aotearoa airliner, also a flying-boat. One of the largest crowds to visit the port was at Lyttelton the day the Centaurus arrived. When it came to New Zealand, it had finished the longest flight in the history of British aviation. Spectators were expecting a big spectacle at the landing. According to newspaper reports, they were disappointed. The big plane came in over Gebbies Pass and quickly landed at Erskine Point. A north-east breeze carried away the sound of its four engines. The landing was “too quickly and too efficiently carried out to excite the crowd,” said the report. Later, a civic welcome was

held on Warner’s Hotel balcony. The next day, at 6 a.m., the Centaurus took off for Dunedin. The Centaurus Road resident has a painting of the Centaurus by G. Barker. Here, too

YESTERDAY’S news story about James J. Kilroy, the American shipyard worker who originated the famous “Kilroy was here” saying during World War 11, reminded a Christchurch man about the craze catching on here. One man, a Chinese market gardener who sold his produce door-to-door in the south-eastern suburbs, had it chalked on the side of his horse-drawn cart this way: “Kilroy been here.” Angels of Mons SOMETIMES you see a photograph or painting that you cannot get out of your mind, but when you try to find it, you are stumped. That has happened to a Christchurch woman whose grandmother, who lived in Central Otago, had a copy of a painting years ago. The family knew the painting as “The Angels of Mons.” It depicted angels appearing between the British and German soldiers at Mons during World War I. If anyone has information about a painting of that kind, the woman can be reached through us. The dresser JOHN ROWLES, a New Zealand version of Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck combined, commented on his attire when he met reporters in Christchurch this week He gestured to a young woman and said she was his bodyguard. he had a loose button on his shirt, and he said she dressed him, too. Later, in a seeming contradiction to his not-too-perfect state of dress, he said that he liked to dress as a “Vogue”-type trendy. My seat! WHILE a Christchurch woman., was visiting her

daughter in Sydney recently, a visit to the opera was arranged. The women were shown to their seats and settled in to watch the performance. Before it began, a woman came up and insisted that one of them was sitting in her seat. She had sat there during every opera that year, and she had every intention of sitting there again. The New Zealanders were sitting where they had been shown, and they had every intention of staying put—until, that is, the daughter looked again at the tickets. The numbers their usher had taken for their seats were the date. They moved.

—Stan Darling