Reporter’s diary

Press, 21 February 1986, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Commitment THE SUPREME dedication to duty of the nursing profession never ceases to amaze us. A former Christchurch nurse who has joined the staff of Christchurch Hospital after two years in London spent most of her first day last Monday filling out the complex forms and documents on which bodies such as hospital boards thrive. She arrived home at her flat too exhausted to do anything but watch television, a rather dreary pastime compared with her social life in London. Although she had spent half the day writing her name, date of birth, and so, on it took a telephone call from her mother to remind the nurse that it was her birthday. Could be worse? ™ TalTeld 6 pop ,T nLnL-nn Le M der M f T the Mc Jr 3y * h °» ld „ n i c e l n lower K tban the pons show — below te # kes the recognised emir iacthit'^nt P nno n« ot °" e uOon ranks iiim as preferred Prime Minister Mr McLay’s ranking is now 3.3 per cent down from 3.6 per cent in December. The margin of error in the Heylen polls is put at -4 per cent. jr,.. llt Stop A SIGN outside the Otira pub, where a cosy fire burns even in summer, warns thirsty motorists that this is the last watering hole for umpteen kilometres. Petrol is almost as important if not more so, and 500 people have signed a petition calling for it to be sold in the Otira township. The petition was organised by the Otira Tearooms proprietors, Glenys and Kelly Gray, who will run the Otira’ Petrol Station if their application fort a motor spirits licence! is successful. Mrs Gray said

that most of the people who had signed the petitton were passing motor1818 - A separate petition was signed by local residents to show how much petrol they used in a week, and both documents were sent to Mobil Oil in Christchurch. Mrs Gray s®jd it was embarrassing when travellers came to tt} e l°, 38 * !? r P e^r3 ]r The petrol station next door ha 3 tteen cloBed f or a year. The Grays apphcation for a motor spirits licence is expected to beard in April. .. Hiding Wide SOME PAPANUI High school pupils could do with a lesson in road rules, not to mention courtesy and consideration. Numbers of them were riding their bicycles U P *° f° ur ob reas t across day morning, no doubt enjoying themselves but reducing buses and other traffic behind them to a cra wl- Unless their road manners.improve, an imPatted driver or a worse-than-usual wobble by a cyclist is bound to result « QpriniiQ apridpnt ' a serious acc,dent ' rj n .7 Wlia 11 OUR ITEM the other day about why “Mikhail Lermontov” was printed differently in this newspaper from the name on the 1 bow of the sunken cruise ship (because "The Press” typesetting does not include Russian language characters) reminded a reader of a similar incident. The scene was the auditorium of a Royal New Zealand Air Force base in i 960, about the time of the Rome Olympics. The übiquitous Selwyn Toogood was conducting a session of the popular show, “It’s in the Bag!” Question to contestant: “For what do the letters CCCP on the Russian athletes’ jerseys stand?” Contestant: “They don’t have ’ CCCP on them.” Mr Too-

good (somewhat sarcastically): “Oh, what do they have on them?” Contestant (authoritatively): “They have ‘ess ess ess air,’ and it stands for Soyuz Sovietskikh Sotsialistischeskikh Respublik.” As "Punch” would have said: “Collapse of quizmaster.” Mr Toogood was not aware that at the time, the New Zealand Services were offering members a pay bonus for passing examinations in the Russian and Chinese languages. This was not appreciated by everybody. The R.N.Z.A.F.’s Director of Education was forced to abandon study of Chinese after his family objected to his wandering about the house practising the vowel sounds. The right stuff PRESIDENT REAGAN used some beautiful words in his epitaph for the space shuttle astronauts, but he was quoting from an earlier generation of fliers when he said: “We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God.” The passage was taken from the poem. “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee, aged 19, an American pilot, who was killed in December, 1941, while serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. The manuscript was found on his body. Forty-five years later his words moved a nation. Committed DUBIOUS job references include the tale of a young army wife in Quetta during World War II who wrote glowingly of her "sweeper” (household sanitary orderly): “I can strong recommend him as a man who throws himself wholeheartedly into everyything he carries out” * * —Jreter Comer