Category: Uncategorized
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My sceptical carpet ride
Here’s another old column from my book, Son, give me back my trousers I have nothing against professional carpet cleaners. Anyone who can look at a red stain on a carpet and identify it immediately as Grange Hermitage 1963, made from grapes grown on the eastern side of the hill, has my utmost respect. Unless,…
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Starring in my own P-grade movie
I am spreadeagled on an adjustable chair with tubes up two of my orifices (hint: neither my mouth, nor my ears, nor my nostrils — which is comforting because it probably means my urologist knows what he’s doing.) I am here for a bladder pressure test and the date is mid-to-late 2025. My brain plays…
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Erasing my career, one newsroom at a time
I’ve started to wonder if someone is quietly erasing my working life.It began with my first workplace, The Examiner in Launceston.For more than 160 years, it sat in the same building in Paterson Street — a place so tied to the paper it might as well have been part of the masthead. Then it moved. Just…
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Of bludgers, grudges and falling walls
My most vivid memory of starting out at The Examiner newspaper in Launceston is not my first byline, nor even my first mistake. It’s a wall. It came down without warning during a newsroom refurbishment in the late 1970s. Not a metaphorical wall — a real one. A temporary partition collapsed on to the chief-of-staff’s desk. The…
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The man with no ears and the man with no fears
I never met Mark “Chopper” Read, but I have sat on his barstool. It was at the Royal Oak in Launceston in the late 1970s when I was 18 or 19. I was pleased because I had found myself a prime position at the bar. Then someone burst my bubble. “You can’t sit there, mate…
JOHN MARTIN'S TALES 