Reporter’s diary

Press, 12 May 1987, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Do-it-yourself SHADES of days when motorised transport was in its infancy: last Friday a bus scheduled to leave on its 7.30 p.m. run from Picton to Christchurch showed a lack of enthusiasm for the journey and stoutly refused to start, in short, a flat battery. No amount of persuasion worked, so about a dozen passengers obligingly got out and pushed. The trip continued uneventfully, but as a safeguard, the engine was kept running during refreshment stops. Not so fast

A WORD of caution about those sensitive fuchsia bushes mentioned in this column last Friday. Although indoor and hanging plants can be trimmed now, outside bushes should not be pruned before winter. Unless they are left until after the frosts are over, the cold can bum the raw cuts of pruning and cause dieback. If they have already had an over-enthusiastic haircut, cover them with straw, lawn mulch, or a sack... anything to keep the frost off.

Tourist traps

OXFORD is scarcely Canterbury’s top tourist attraction but things are surely not as bad as it seemed at the Ashley Promotion Council meeting recently. An Oxford representative at the meeting said he knew of a couple from the North Island who had spent a night in Oxford because they had lost their way to

Christchurch. How could anyone not find Christchurch? Surely it’s simply a. matter of “right hand down a bit” at Darwin? Recycled ingenuity AN INVENTION — no doubt bom of necessity — has caused a stir among spinners taking part in the National Woolcraft Fes-

tival, being held at Lincoln College until Sunday. Faced with the problem of combing tough wool, a back-country spinner evolved an artefact that had the toughness of a shearer’s comb with the easy-to-grip shape of a cow’s horn, the metal comb being glued tightly into a slit in the bone. The lethal-looking tool could possibly double as a hairbrush for masochists.

Pointer BROAD arrows (on prison clothing and other Government property and referred to in this column last Thursday) are still used in at least one section of the Government. A reader, a surveyor, says that the 1972 survey regulations regarding the surveying of land, section 21, subsection VI, direct that boundary marks, where

possible, should be branded or carved with a broad arrow. The broad arrow was also used by the Post and Telegraph authorities on some equipment, with the arrow between the P and the T. Its use with the P and T probably died out when the N.Z.P.O. was born in 1959. An airman with the New Zealand Air Force was issued with a wooden, felt-lined pencil box decorated with a broad arrow in 1971. Long v. broad ALTHOUGH the origin of the broad arrow is murky, its use goes back at least a couple of centuries. An indication that its use is dying is the number of people who did not know the difference between an ordinary arrow and a broad arrow. The “wings” on the latter are as long as the main "stem.”

It would, wouldn't it?

A CARPET cleaning fluid stuck in solid globs to the pile of a shag carpet so only painstaking scrubbing would remove it. Toiling long and patiently, the owner used all the elbow grease she could, until a sharp pain in her elbow brought her to an abrupt halt. But alas! The poor woman never knew it was tennis elbow, or the effect it would have, until she held a cup of tea a little later. Her arm collapsed, splattering tea through the carpet she had spent the last few hours sweating over.

—Jenny Feltham