Geoffrey Lee Martin is a journalist, now living in Sydney, who cheerfully practices the old adage that “old journos never die, they just keep boring everybody with their recollections”. He is quite shameless about this but, like most journalists, is too lazy – until this book – to put these endless reminiscences down on paper.
He has been married and divorced twice – Pamela, 1950-62, which resulted in daughters, Susan, Beth, Janet, Bridget and son Bruce; and Jan, 1969-82, which produced Katharine. He now has a longhaired dachshund, the latest of five, called Jacqueline, and at times this still feels like too many women in his life.
Lee Martin was educated at Auckland Grammar School (also Sir Edmund Hillary’s alma mater), with stints at the universities of Auckland and Melbourne and at Perugia’s Universita per Stranieri. He fell in love with Italy, particularly Rome, after his first visit in 1966 – not a bad decade for it, really -- and now spends as much time as he can afford in and around a lovely walled, hilltop village in Tuscany.