Category: Uncategorized
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A 10-star breakfast comes unstuck
I wrote this 26 years ago. From my book Jack and the Jellybean Stalk. We were batching and four-year-old Jack woke me early on a Sunday morning looking thoroughly distressed. “I think I swallowed a spoon,” he announced. “When did this happen?” I croaked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Last night.” “I think you…
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Rumble in the jingle jungle
I was once professionally involved in not just one, but two, annoying jingles. This was the mid-1980s, when I worked as a sub-editor on a newspaper in Launceston and was sometimes rostered on to a Saturday evening newspaper shift. If I was really unlucky, I’d be assigned to compile the afternoon’s horse-racing results. Today, that…
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Metropole holds my chess secret
I couldn’t be the only chess player with a connection to the old Metropole Hotel in Launceston. Could I? This establishment stood in Brisbane Street for nearly 100 years before being demolished in 1976. It opened in the early 1880s as the Launceston Coffee Palace, and my instincts tell me this was exactly the sort…
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Letter on the fridge to my wife about 27 years ago
Forgive me for rambling on more than usual in this preamble. But it’s timely… in a 31st wedding anniversary sort of way. Yes, we tick off that milestone today. We were married at Cradle Mountain in Tasmania on August 7, 1995. It has been my role each year to research what gifts are pertinent to…
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My contribution to medical science
History is full of doctors and scientists who believed the quickest way to test a theory was on themselves. It sounds reckless today, but many regarded it as the ultimate proof of conviction. If they weren’t prepared to risk their own lives, why should anyone else? Australian doctor Barry Marshall famously swallowed Helicobacter pylori bacteria in 1984…
JOHN MARTIN'S TALES 