Let me say at the outset that my darling mother was the most gentle, kind hearted person you could hope to meet. However, she did have a penchant for filling our heads with the most terrifying information imaginable. We kids were both fascinated and appalled. Her stories
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Hello Dear People Well because my vegie growing was so awesome, my guardian Pauline Conolly finally agreed to buy me a little greenhouse. The only trouble was that she took the cheap option (what a surprise….NOT) and it came in at least 100 bits. OMG!!
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AN EASTER STORY, FROM EDITOR DES Well, I read somewhere that lots of people eat fish on Good Friday, so I asked my guardian Pauline to make me a rod. I thought I knew where a rainbow trout might be lurking. It was a bit hot when
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INTRODUCING EDITOR DES OF BLACKHEATH Thanks for agreeing to this interview Editor Des. I must say, you are the personification of sartorial elegance today. A. Thank you. I bought this suit in a posh shop at Henley-on-Thames. Well that’s in England. It does look quite expensive.
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‘Oh! All that steam! The pudding had just been taken out of the cauldron. Oh! That smell! The same as the one which prevailed on washing day. It is that of the cloth which wraps the pudding. Charles Dickens ‘A Christmas Carol’ Christmas in Australia is a
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AN EARLY STAMP OF STUPIDITY At the age of seven I decided to become a stamp collector. In a generous act of encouragement I was given a stamp album assembled over many years by an older cousin. I cut out the largest and most exotic of his
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LAWS OF LINGUISTICS In Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, chief protagonist Jude Fawley naively assumes that learning a foreign language is like cracking a code; that mastering two or three words will miraculously provide the key to understanding the entire vocabulary. Hardy refers to this as Grimm’s
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DAYDREAMS I was raised on a small dairy farm near Ulverstone, on the north west coast of Tasmania. Many would consider this an idyllic childhood, and in retrospect it was. However, owing to a steady diet of American comic books I longed to be anywhere else but
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You know what? Lately my editing hasn’t been going so well, because I missed a few errors in one of my employer Pauline Conolly’s articles. In my defense, she does make a lot of typos. The pay isn’t much good either. Hardly enough to keep a person
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Hello, well bottoms are very funny, aren’t they? Q. WHAT HAS A BOTTOM AT THE TOP? A. MY LEGS! That’s a joke I made up by myself. I spend a lot of time with my bottom in the air. It’s so the blood can run
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