Category: Uncategorized
-
Waiter, there’s a red-hot poker in my beer
When I was growing up in the 1960s, Christmas dinner at our place wasn’t complete without a bottle of Palfrey Pearl. If you’ve never encountered Palfrey Pearl, imagine someone looked at a perfectly good grape and thought, “Let’s see how much sugar we can add before somebody notices.” I was about eight years old when…
-
The Christmas Day that was never supposed to happen
It’s very early on Christmas Day 1983 and two of us are following a weak torch beam along a dark, rugged beach. When I say beach, don’t picture golden sand and gently lapping waves. This one comes complete with towering dunes, dense scrub, razor-sharp rocks and, because it’s Tasmania, freezing rain. We set off from…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
