When I was a kid, I used to go to the movies on a Saturday morning. Or, as my late Uncle ( Mum's brother )  used to call it, The Flicks. Others called it “ The Pictures “ or “ The cinema” … no matter, we went to see a movie and it cost a shilling. In fact, I had friends who called  it the Flea House, though I never really understood why. 

We would all sit down in our seats, the lights would dim and a movie of a Lady on a horse would appear.  We would stand up for the Lady on the horse and sing about saving the Queen. Only after we had sung about how wonderful she was and how important it was that we love our country, only then, could we sit down again and wait for the lady with the ice creams to come around.

It was magical. The crowded theatre; the Lady on the horse, the lady with the ice creams and the lady with the torch that led latecomers to their seats.

THE CAMEL, THE TOOTH AND THE EMERGENCY DIESEL

Ratty News Special Report

A follow-up to “There’s Gold in Them Thair Hills”

By Roderick “Whiskers” McNibble, Chief Investigative Correspondent
Dusty Gulch Gazette

There are mornings when a reporter knows, before breakfast, that the day is going to be troublesome.

This was one of them.

I was sitting in the Dusty Gulch Gazette office, scratching at my whiskers, when I developed a toothache.

Not a little toothache.

A proper one.

I have been thinking a lot about this lately. The concept of " Beyond Reasonable Doubt. " 

It was 1976. My then husband , a young detective in the New Zealand Police Force, was sent away to work on a murder investigation.

He was away for weeks.

Every so often he would telephone home. There were no mobile phones then, no quick messages sent back and forth, no way of knowing what was happening unless he told me.

So I listened. And I learned. 

There was a young woman who had disappeared. She had been living with her husband in a caravan in a caravan park beside the beach while they looked for a house. That morning he had gone off to his new teaching job. She had gone to the beach. Sunbathing was part of her ordinary day.

Then she disappeared......

Yeah Nah, Nah Yeah - On government, growing up, and knowing when to step aside.

Australians have never been particularly good at taking orders.

We invented Yeah Nah and Nah Yeah for a reason.

But perhaps those two little expressions contain a surprisingly good lesson about government, children, and knowing when to protect someone,  and when to get the hell out of their way.

I have been thinking about government, which is dangerous enough these days.

I posted a question on a forum I belong to:

What makes good government?

One answer stopped me.

“Good people make a good government. So the real question is: what makes good people?”

During the early years of World War II, the British Army faced many obstacles. Chief among them were bridges. The irony was stark: the very structures designed to connect and enable movement became the obstacles that had to be overcome to win the war.

As the British advanced across Europe, retreating German forces left destruction in their wake, blowing up bridges to slow the pursuit. Existing military bridge designs were too heavy, too slow, or too resource-hungry to keep pace with tanks and supply lines. Progress stalled wherever rivers ran.

Enter Sir Donald Bailey, a civil engineer with a practical streak and a knack for simplicity. His answer was lightweight, modular, and portable- a bridge that could ride in pieces on trucks, be bolted together by ordinary soldiers with simple tools, and still bear the weight of a 30-ton tank.

The Bailey Bridge was born.