Random reminder

Press, 28 January 1986, Page 6

Random reminder

OPPORTUNIST They were admiring the Fox Glacier on the final day of their holiday when the husband realised that under their feet was the answer to a problem which had stumped him for months. “Rocks!” he said enthusiastically, “Great rocks!” In answer to his wife’s baffled look, he explained that they were just the right kind — sparkly schists — to add the final touch to his fishpond. Before she could turn the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach into words of discouragement he, always one to put decisions into immediate effect, had bounded back to their van and was unloading ice-axes, boots, parkas, boxes of food and other junk, and finally the mattress. “Round thin ones,” he said, waving his arms about enthusiastically, “about this big.” Envisioning a jail sentence for tampering with a National Park, his wife trailed behind him as he sought the most perfect rocks, and found herself helping to stagger back to the van with the bigger ones.

Half the floor of the van was covered

with rocks when a tour bus drew up and Dutch tourists climbed out “Rocks ... ?” they thought (in Dutch, of course), and began to take photos. When the last of the rocks was tenderly installed on its bed of cardboard and the couple put the mattress back on top of them, one man could remain an observer no longer. “Rocks under the bed, isn’t it?” he asked, coming to stand next to the van. Her experience of orthopaedic nursing threw up an answer, and not wanting to start a long conversation, she gave it to him: “A hard surface is good for the spine.” While the tourist scratched his head and wondered about it, they threw in the boots, parkas, ice-axes and so on and drove ponderously away. The completed fishpond looks magnifi- _ - cent, and visitors, having admired the - fish, the waterlilies, and the tiny waterfall, usually finish by admiring the rocks surrounding it They can never understand the husband’s remark that, “Rocks r are good for the spine,” nor his wife’s