Life in New Zealand

Burglar caught on camera going to rehab

Press, 4/11/17

Head to Otahuhu Pool and Leisure, Mason Ave every Tuesday from 10.30-11.30am for Park Yoga. Bring a mat and water. Manukau Courier, 2/11/17

Airport to city ferry swell idea Dominion Post, 9/12/17

“There’s a little bit of bitter sweat as the programme is finishing at the end of the year.” Weekend Herald, 11/11/17 “… I haven’t used toilet paper since. It’s the best thing since sliced bread!”

NZ Grey Power Magazine, November 2017

“You’re always going somewhere new, and sometimes you’ve never been there before,” he said.

Nelson Mail, 13/10/17

She says she’s certain that’s when conception occurred, as she had stopped taking the pill due to a calf problem.

NZ Herald, 24/8/17

Anthony McCarten is a goodish screenwriter (“Blood, sweat & tears”, January 6). However, he is not a historian and his assertion that Winston Churchill came “dangerously” close to entering a peace deal with Hitler at the end of May 1940 when the British Army was retreating to Dunkirk is a novelist speaking.

Churchill did no such thing. Faced with the appeasement tendencies of two Tory colleagues in his War Cabinet of five, Viscount Halifax and Neville Chamberlain (and the majority of his party in Parliament), he simply outmanoeuvred them.

The film portrayal of Churchill by Gary Oldman is magnificent, but the screenplay lets him down by the sentimental and cringeworthy scene (utterly fictitious) that shows Churchill travelling one stop on the London Underground, in a carriage with no perceptible movement or sound, soliciting the views of “ordinary” Londoners, in turn awed, alarmed and then charmed, to find out what they think about fighting on or entering a peace deal with Hitler. Naturally, led by a nineyear-old child, they tell him (three cheers) to fight on.

So if an Oscar is to be awarded, it would justifiably be for Oldman’s acting, not for anything else.

David Townsend (Miramar, Wellington)

Correspondent P Norwood ( Letters, January 20) asks what the world would be like now if there had been no one of Churchill’s calibre. Presumably it would be a united Europe run from Germany and with Britain out of it.

Dean Parker (Auckland)