From the Editor: A testing week | Canterbury Opinion | Local Voices from Canterbury, New Zealand

It's a tough lot being an editor at times.

You're the person readers want to shoot down if they don't agree with what's in the paper; if they feel they have been personally aggrieved by an article or they get upset by something I might have written in this column.

You either try to reason with them - you tell them you disagree with their point of view and why - or you apologise to them if they are right and you are wrong; or you simply roll with the punches.

As weeks go, this has been a fairly testy one.

My column a couple of weeks ago where I used the word 'C' word (the religious one) still prompts emails, most of them not overly friendly.

I'm a fairly straight-down-the-middle sort of bloke - what you see is what you get - so there was no deliberate intention to upset.

But convincing those with strong views has been somewhat difficult.

Many have pointed out to me what happens to people in "other countries who blaspheme".

I also got scolded by a reader for my column on Bealey Ave traffic.

She told me I should be cycling instead. In fact, she said I probably needed to do some cycling!

But hey, when I go to work, it's dark. When I get home, it's dark and the roads in my part of town are full of pot holes and filled with dirty brown contaminated water.

Who wants to bike through that?

The Moon Man article got the phones buzzing.

An older woman said if she found him, she'd "slit his throat". Nice.

An 82-year-old Yorkshireman who had been through the Blitz said: "I'm not frightened of anyone", adding he'd give Ken Ring a "bunch of fives". Fair enough.

But the week has had a silver lining.

I found a wallet last Friday near our temporary office in Hagley Park. I tracked down the owner. He was very thankful.

It turned out he lived fairly close to me so I dropped it around to his house on Saturday morning. They too live in a badly affected earthquake area.

"You're the man in the paper," said his mother who answered the door with a big smile.

She insisted I take a bottle of wine as a thank you.

"Not necessary," I replied .

"I'll drop it if you don't," she laughed.

So what could a guy do.

It's tasted good all week.