Later our family shifted over to Witless Bay which is just the next town up the shore. Our extended family rented a property there that included an old house we knew as “The Alders”. It was a pretentious sounding way of naming our property which, by the way, had neither running water nor electricity but did have alder trees and a clear path to the ocean. The alders are still there. This was way back in the early 1960s. Now in that same area these days there is the retirement home. A new modern home now sits on the exact location where we used to stay. The land hasn’t changed. The shoreline is the same and the same still big rocks are there. This week I did note that the meadow I knew so well as a boy is all tore up by an ATV track.

In Witless Bay, summer fun included among other things cutting out tongues down at the Newfoundland Quick Freeze fish plant; catching tomcods or sculpins off the wharf; and wandering around the landwash. In case you didn’t know the landwash is that area between high tide and low tide on the beach. It was so interesting because it was filled with the flotsam of a whole ocean. You could find anything down at the landwash at low tide. Things from nearby harbours and things from halfway round the world. In the interest of full disclosure – now lest you get too wrapped up in a romantic notion of things washed ashore – the landwash was also a place where all the garbage was thrown. Mercifully that is no longer true but back in 1960 all our leftovers were hauled down to the landwash. We thought that the ocean could handle anything. We have found over the last half century that simply isn’t true. It is hoped that it wasn’t “a lesson too late in the learning.”

The landwash was a place to look for stuff and there was lots to find. There were old pieces of nets to be found there and old floats off cod-traps. Glass was used for some of those floats in those days. Sometimes cork was used because plastic was just arriving on the scene. It would arrive though and we would be the poorer for it. You know cork was great. You know for what? For making hockey pucks. We used to play hockey in the fish store where salt cod was cured. Up on the second floor you could find space for a hockey game with a hunk of cork shaped round for a puck. I have a clear memory of an early fall game when the wind was blowing hard and rain was landing loudly on the clapboards of the fish store where we played. It all felt so wonderful to be inside and dry. You could even pick away at a little piece of salted fish. It wasn’t great for your health but certainly did wonders for the soul. The fish store was a place of leisure and of safety and of refuge. It had an “other worldly quality” to it.

I was up to the Witless Bay plant last week. It is still a fish plant but now the stock in trade is shrimp or crab. It used to be cod with salted cod giving way to flash frozen fillets for the Boston market. I worked there for several summers on a skinning machine. I took cod fillets from the line and fed them into the skinning machine. It was no fun. I also worked on the boning line. Also, not much fun. What was fun was the landwash. There under rocks you could find mussels. You could find old longers, the cross pieces from fish stages washed away. There were all kinds of wood on the beach from God knows where. Not a lot of things came in tins in those days but there were lots of sturdy bottles. Lots of ointment jars and lemon crystal jars down at the landwash. Noxema had very durable glass containers.

What has changed now on the beaches? You probably can guess. It is the abundance of plastics, and it isn’t just bottles. Down near Marystown, a few years ago, I wandered a beach and what stood the most were all the used shotgun shells. Those shell cases were made of plastic and they never rot away. They are all over the place.

In Witless Bay the smell of the landwash has changed. It is still one-part Atlantic Ocean, but the other part is the left-over smell of a crab plant. It is not a bad smell, just not the same as a cod plant. Not worse nor better. Just different. No more smell of cod offal. No more smell of cod liver oil cooking. No more smell of salt fish drying in the sun. I loved those heady aromas of summer and fall. I do miss them but the landwash and all it holds is still there. It is glorious.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

My first radio job was with VOCM in the newsroom, and I worked the late shift there at first finishing up my day at midnight. It was there I got my first hosting gig reading the midnight news. “The last news of the day, the first news of tomorrow” is what the promo said. That is where the door opened even further to other spots on-air. I did some hockey “colour” with George McLaren and Rod French – Newfoundland senior hockey and the Allan Cup. I did some games of the infamous Barrie Flyers- St. John’s Capitals series. That was great. I also did some late night and early morning DJ work. Announcers is what we called ourselves. I would get off the news desk at midnight on a Friday night and walk around to the other studio and sit into the big audio board and start the All-Night Show. That ran until six in the morning. Playing music for people was really cool.

How much did I love DJ work? When I moved to CJON a couple of years later, part of that opportunity I asked for was a chance to keep my hand in and do some CJON on-air TV reading AND some AM radio work as well. Geez, it was like I had died and gone to heaven. I did TV news and radio news and other stuff. I did a Canada-Honduras soccer game once with Carl Lake. I hosted the Little Miss Mount Pearl Pageant, and I did a few CJON radio shifts including some Saturday night rock shifts. I have tapes but you can’t hear them. It was like I had won the lottery. I read TV news and radio news with John Nolan and Bob Lewis and Vince Gallant. Eventually I moved on to FM radio when OZ started but that didn’t last long although I had fun there too.

Eventually I became exclusively a television person, but I can tell you there is part of my heart that will always remember AM radio. It was another world. That was a place where you were really part of the community working in a universe that was filled with opportunity. Now radio in the 1970s was a place filled with odd characters. Some were gifted and some were not. They all shared a trait though and that is they wanted to be on-air. They craved attention like it was a drug. Radio was one of those places where you could start at the bottom and get to the top if your worked hard and hung in there. There was certainly less structure in those days and a better chance to play whatever you wanted. Certainly, that was true in the Midnight to 6 a.m. shift because even program directors, station managers and other bosses have to sleep too so overnight you had a longer leash. That situation had to change. I understand that because it was too free- form in those early days, but it was such fun.

Just so you know at three in the morning you are the only person in the building, but you can go the washroom or make a cup of noodles if you play The Wreck of the Edmund FitzGerald or MacArthur Park. You will have time.

It was a different world. Someone in the radio business said correctly it was a little unhinged. It was all of that. TV News is where I eventually found home, but I tried to keep my hand in the strange world of AM radio. Thirty years ago, it was a magical world of music and program logs and sponsor carts and public service announcements. I learned it all and drank it all in. Then the formula for success could be reduced to a simple command. Identify the station with the call letters as in CJON 930; give the time; give the temperature; identify yourself and roll the next record.

To wit “CJON radio … 2.35 on a Saturday morning ….20 degrees in the capital city under cloudy skies with sunshine later in the day…. my name is Jim Furlong, and these are the Beatles.” That’s all there is to it.

As an old program director said to me on time; “Always remember, Jim, nobody cares what YOU actually think about anything!” They listen to the station for the time, the temperature, and the music. Do I miss those days? Yes, of course. They were filled with an innocence but also with a bunch of stuff mostly of excesses bad for me. It was a world of poor diet, long hours with not enough sleep, and tension by the truckload. It was also a wonderful way to make a living. People listened to be entertained. Hopefully you made them feel better in some way. You connected. I used to tell people that of you listen to enough songs on the radio you will eventually hear YOUR story being told. Guaranteed.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

They were quite different times. In those days you could smoke in the workplace and smoking and being on the phone looked pretty cool to my very cloudy way of thinking. If co-workers didn’t like the smell of smoke or had health concerns, then to Hell with them. A smoker knew his rights back in those days by God! It was all about MY rights and freedom of choice and things like that. It was long before the days when such vague notions as second-hand smoke, cancer, emphysema, and the health of others became an issue. It was the time of those heady days when the paid shills of the tobacco industry like announcer Joel Aldred talked about “personal choice” and “individual rights”. Aldred, who was a broadcaster of some renown, a media spokesman for Rothman’s of Canada, and the executor of the estate of the late John Diefenbaker, was a great smoker. Smoke on.

I stopped smoking because of money. The health of my wife or my sons was NEVER a factor. Smokers are too far selfish for that. My dad died of lung cancer, but I didn’t care about that either. He was a two pack of Camels a day guy, but I didn’t see any lesson to be learned there either. Camels are Camels and Rothmans are Rothmans and in the seriously flawed logic of smokers that means there is NO connection, so the “Grim Reaper” wasn’t coming for me. It was FINANCIAL guilt that made me stop. Cigarettes were gone to nearly $5 a pack and I was smoking a pack and a half a day and more on the weekends. You can tell a smoker because he always has money on him. A smoker, like me, had to know where his next $5 was coming from. There might not be a tin of Carnation or a box of Pampers in the house but the $5 in your pocket was still going to Mr. Rothman. Sure, you went out to work in the morning you had to have cigarettes with you and when you came home at night you made sure you had enough cigarettes to get you through to morning.

When you are a smoker, you also spend a lot of time at the bank machine. One night coming home late from work I was supposed to pick up some dish detergent. When I got to the store, I didn’t have enough money for both the detergent and the Rothmans so, you guessed it, I bought a pack of Rothman’s. No dishes were washed in Casa Furlong that night. Somewhere in the darkness of that evening, I understood the complete absurdity of what I was doing. The next day I went to the doctor and got a prescription for the Nicotine Patch. They were prescription only back then. I didn’t use it right away. That weekend I went to bed early on Friday night. It had been a tough week and after work myself and me missus had had a couple of drinks. I smoked like a tilt, as the expression goes, and dozed off to sleep watching television. When I woke up it was about 4:14 on Saturday morning. I made a cup of tea with lots of sugar and smoked a cigarette. Then I smoked another one and had another cup of tea. I turned on the TV and watched a couple of those odd programs that used to haunt the morning airwaves. Ron Popeil and his “Showtime Rotisserie” was on. Somewhere in there I had another cup of tea and a few more cigarettes. It was 7 a.m. when the rest of the house began to wake up. I put a Nicotine Patch on my arm and went to bed. I never smoked another cigarette. It was the most important day of my life. Every time I see the “Showtime Rotisserie” commercials now I smile and feel good about myself. I can’t belief I did it, but I did. By the way I celebrated by 80th birthday. I haven’t smoked a cigarette in 40 years.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

I had flippers for lunch on an April day a couple of years ago. It was flipper pie. It was the first time in more than 50 years since I tasted them. Grandmother Malone used to cook them as a regular part of that Newfoundland rite of spring that is the annual seal hunt or what is left of it. Grandfather had been for many years “at the ice” for Bowring Brothers. As it turns out Grandfather wasn’t a sealer. He was a carpenter and there was lots of carpentry to be done on Bowring’s S.S. Eagle.

Now Grandmother Malone used to cook flippers, or “fippers” as she called them in the ancient way, with a hard pastry and vegetables and slices of lemon cooked right into the hard crust pie. Anyway, I had flipper pie a few springs ago because I wanted to see if the taste would remind me of Grandmother’s house which it did. Taste and smell are very strong memory triggers and for a brief moment I was back in a basement kitchen on Pleasant Street in a long-ago spring where it was nice and warm and where there was a flipper dinner steaming in the oven.

Now I need to tell you that the flipper pie I had last time wasn’t in anyone’s kitchen. It was down at a chic hotel in St. John’s where flippers on the menu attracts the patriotic crowd like me. When you eat flippers these days it’s like you are somehow contributing to our struggle against the world by eating them. I also have to tell you that I didn’t really finish that meal but that too reminded me that back at Grandmother’s is where I ALSO didn’t really finish them. I ate the vegetables and the pastry and the slices of lemon but stayed away from the seal itself. Now there is some risk in telling this little story because it is a still an embattled seal hunt in which we are involved. We have reacted as we should react by defending, what is for us, part of the way of life that helped us cling to this rock in the first place. That is why to say that I don’t really like seal is something said only under my breath because I might be seen as either a traitorous wretch or a fool.

Some years ago, however I was able to shed myself of some of this “I don’t like flipper” angst because of something that happened in the NTV Newsroom. Usually on Fridays, every couple of weeks or so, we had pizza for the staff. We worked like dogs and after a good hard week of work we sent out for something to eat. It’s a nice tradition. On that Friday, though, fresh from my flipper dinner at the hotel I thought it would be a brilliant idea if we brought in some flipper pies instead of pizza. The near universal reply from the newsroom when I mentioned it was a resounding; “Thanks Jim, but no thanks!” Everybody wanted pizza or fish and chips.

I tried playing the patriotic card then although I had no right to but that failed. Nobody wanted anything to do with “fippers” – so I asked them all about there own flipper experiences. One of them put the whole thing about flippers into a perspective I could finally understand. He said every family seems to have a recipe whereby the seal meat is judged by how little it tastes like what it actually is which is seal. “The way Mom cooks it you would never know but that it’s roast beef.” That, of course, begs the question that if that is where the bar is set why don’t you just run down to Sobey’s or Dominion and get some roast beef instead of trimming endless fat and firing on baking soda and throwing in slices of lemon all in the aid of keeping seal from tasting like, well, seal?

Another good point that was made is why do so many people qualify their love of seal by saying that one good meal a year is enough. If it is so great, why don’t they eat it four times a week in the spring? Riddle me that why don’t you. Anyway, that’s it. I am confessing as “a dirty auld St. Johnsman” as Grandmother Malone, who was from Bay Bulls, used to call the townies. This spring it’s steak and kidney pie for me again. Don’t hate me.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

The internal decision in my head to not participate this time around in politics was swung partly by the fact that the meeting to which I was invited was a virtual meeting. That meant, among other things, no hotels, no beer by the barrel, no late nights or free stuff of any kind. I mentioned all this to someone I knew that I had considered it, and she said, “You just want to BELONG to something.” You know, upon further review as they say in sports, she was right. We all want to be part of something. We want to belong.

The opening to the TV series Cheers always struck an emotional chord in my heart. The setting was a place in which individuals were finding relief from some awful emptiness of the world by being in a bar sipping beer. The benefits were spelled out. Cheers was a bar where “everybody knows your name.” That defines a kind of salvation from the realization that on some important level; you are alone in the world and the path you walk is often walked by yourself.

The Toronto Maple Leaf experience is like that. It is the failure of a team over decades. The edge of that failure becomes blunted in some way and a salve applied to the wound by making it a shared experience. The approach is given life by an expression that I love, and it is “Leaf Nation.” That expression could bring tears to my eyes. So many people brought together a great tsunami of lost hope and disappointment somehow made at least bearable by it being a shared experience and a confirmation of the truth that each year when an NHL team wins a championship, 31 teams lose.

In the middle of that emotional angst, you are at least not alone. You belong to something. You are part of Leafs Nation. There is a religious aspect to it. A shared set of beliefs and someone to stand with you. 

A quick sidebar story. I am a rabid Manchester United soccer fan. Not just a recent one but I go back to the days before Georgie Best and all the way back to the Munich plane crash disaster that destroyed half the club. In 1980 going through a long, twisting boarding lineup at De Gaulle airport in Paris I passed a young man in a Manchester United shirt. I was wearing a Manchester United hat. He looked at me directly and spoke.

There is only ONE United. That was a reference to the fact there were many soccer teams that carried the name “United”, but the real one was Manchester United. I nodded and tipped my cap to the young man and said, “ONE United!”. He smiled.

Consider now a line from Leonard Cohen. It is to me one of his very best lines. It is from Dress Rehearsal Rag and references a 17th Century metaphysical mystical group still active in the 21st Century called the Rosicrucians. To wit: “Why don’t you join the Rosicrucians they will give you back your hope”. It refers to that of which I speak. It is the idea of finding meaning in something larger than yourself.

It is in the end all about belonging. The Rosicrucians, the Leafs, Cheers, or the Avalon District Liberal Association. They are all places to go. It is the great struggle to belong to something and avoid the great consequence of being in the universe on your own.

I know there is only “ONE United.”

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

It is a fact of history that the United States controlled the vast majority of oil production. Both Germany and Japan suffered throughout the war from fuel shortages. That made oil infrastructure a target for strategic bombing and that is what happened.

Fast forward to 2026 and we see all the issues in the Iran-United States conflict being reduced into controlling the flow of tankers and oil through the Straits of Hermuz. As we know here in Canada there is extreme upward pressure on the price of gasoline these days. It is driven by conflict and uncertainty right now and we see the price of gas moving quickly upward. The question to be answered is where does this all lead.

I am luckier than most people because I am old and mostly retired from the daily workforce. I live about 20 kilometres from my office here at NTV. It is nearly a 50-kilometre round trip, but I don’t have to come every day. I cut down on my trips but stay longer when I am here. That makes sense. I am usually in three or four days a week, but when the price of gas goes up well, I don’t drive so much. I cut down the number of visits because gas is bloody expensive.

Until recently I drove an eight-cylinder pickup truck. It was great. I could carry a pretty fair load on board from a snowblower to birch junks, but it cost money. Even an empty eight-cylinder pickup was a $15 to $20 round trip to St. John’s and that is only if I stayed on the highway and didn’t wander around downtown. I sold the truck and now I have a little four-cylinder car with not much power, but it just sips gas. It works.

Gas was always an issue ever since I was a young man which was an exceptionally long time ago. The cheapest I remember gas prices was at a time when in Toronto it was 25 cents a gallon. That was around 1961. My first car was a 1952 Chev, and someone asked me how many miles I got to the gallon. I answered that I never actually ever had a WHOLE gallon. It was a funny line.

The latest oil crisis is going to change the world. Consider the airlines. The price of jet fuel is up but the problem is airlines can’t do much in terms of raising prices in some areas. For instance, the tickets for this summer’s vacations are already sold. They are bought and paid for. I don’t have to tell you that food costs are up. If it isn’t just the product themselves, it is the cost of getting those items to market and the cost of running the stores that sell those goods to you. Look at the price of a two piece fish and chips. Look at the cost of any and all foods.

Where is the good news? Well, we are in the oil business, Canada in the broad sense but in the narrower sense Newfoundland and Labrador. We have oil and the world very desperately needs oil. That is critical to decisions on new offshore projects like the Bay Du Nord in the Flemish Pass. and whether or not they move forward. Our long-term prospects are quite good.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Last week my mind harkened back to the heady days of Double Daylight Savings Time. We all remember that. The year was 1988 when clocks advanced by two hours in the Spring instead of one. The plan was one of lofty ideals. It was to maximize evening sunlight for us. It did result in late sunrises and sunsets. It was very controversial. Most people didn’t like Double Daylight, but I did.

There were elements of it that were quite disruptive. The business community had to deal with being even more out of step with mainland Canada. Toronto time was two and half hours off our own – difficult for business in its many forms. The thing is that I didn’t miss baseball games or the major network newscasts. Often, I have talked about the power of television. In 1988, I didn’t miss baseball games or newscasts because I just adjusted my sleep pattern. I stayed up later and went to work a bit sleepy.

My world didn’t actually end except I couldn’t stay up for some things. I did do a lot outdoor stuff well into the night. That includes gardening and having a late beer out on the back deck. It does take an adjustment.

I should tell you about my other experience with altered states of daylight and evening hours. Many years ago, I was in Iceland’s capital Reykjavik. My working day in news was over, and I was walking down a road towards my hotel at about 10 in evening. It was still daylight when I heard cheering up a hill off the edge of the road. I walked towards the noise and found there was a soccer pitch and a game in progress. It turns out if was Iceland first division soccer. The home team was Valur FC. I bought my ticket and sat in the stands to watch the game. I had a coffee and a bag of pork rinds. It was great. The game didn’t end until after midnight, but it was still BROAD DAYLIGHT. I had a good time. Valur FC had an American goalkeeper.

So when late night day light came to Newfoundland and Labrador in 1988, I was ready for it. I couldn’t stay up for Johnny Carson anymore and it took me a little longer to get going in the morning, but I survived. I still watched baseball and the network news. The cats were a problem. They don’t have clocks to move forward or set back. They got left out overnight a few times because they wouldn’t come in on time. The birds did fine. They came out at dawn or just before it and started their evening song by the sun and not by any little bird watches.

Somewhere in all is a lesson for 2026. That lesson is related to Stonehenge near Salisbury, England and Machu Picchu in Peru in South America and it has something to so with the spring solstice and the concept of time. As often happens, the lesson escapes me.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

This thing about going to the hospital is that it is just such a foreign world. You are on different soil. All the people who work there dress differently and you get the sense you are a stranger in a very strange land. I don’t mind it really. It is a rest and an escape from my own world. This is true only if you are in there for routine stuff. This time around I was in for ‘imaging’, as they call it. It was an MRI. Not life-threatening stuff put part of the inevitable result of an eight-decade long story of wear and tear on the body. You get used to more frequent visits to hospital. It is part of the whole story. The visits do become more frequent.

Now you know one of the oddest things about “routine” visits to facilities like Health Sciences is that there is something about it that makes me feel good. I have spent a lifetime in a business that required a hundred decisions a day from me. Some were right and some were wrong but there is pressure in that whole thing. Now in semi-retirement my hours are still filled with frequent “if/then’’ situations. There are still decisions to be made, and they do keep you busy. By contrast walking into the main entrance of Health Sciences requires of me only that I do what I’m told by the medical people in charge. I am at the mercy of those that make the place go round. There is an odd peace in that.

First of all, the visit went okay for me. My wife dropped me at the front entrance to the hospital and left me on my own. Having played the movie before I wasn’t foolish enough to go looking for a parking place. I don’t know if that parking situation has improved at the hospital since my last go round but I didn’t want to find out. I was left at front entrance in sweatpants and a hoodie with a shoulder bag that had my documents, my MCP cards, my phone, and a Newfoundland Quarterly to read. The rest was pretty easy. I asked the first person I met who looked like they knew what they were doing where X-ray and imaging might be because I’m not great with signs. Easy. Straight down the hall past the doors and then the first left and after that two rights. I got close but on the last turn I blew it. I ended up at doors of place that said “Operating Room” which was surely not what I was looking for. I knew that wasn’t it, so I asked again. This time I hit the jackpot. I was in ultrasound.

I was in a reception area, and somebody looked at my MCP card and then printed some stuff into a computer and sent me down another hall to a new waiting area. There was only one other person there. She was a woman close to my age. We talked about the things old people talk about and then I was next. Pretty soon lots of few pictures were taken of me by a big machine and then it was over. I had to go back to the front entrance to get picked up by my wife, but I got lost and ended up back in ultrasound which the starting point of my exit strategy. No harm done. I eventually got to the hospital entrance and my missus and then we were off to the nearest restaurant.

There were some surprises. It wasn’t as busy as I remember. These new clinics are taking some of the pressures off. I also got fairly good service at Health Sciences. I didn’t have to wait long, and I met some pleasant people. A good time had by all. In the old days I remember it the hospital was crawling with people and full of hustle and bustle. The individual clinics on the first floor weren’t blocked to the hatches. Maybe things are getting better in that aspect of health care. I hope so.

I never ate in the cafeteria. I never do. I didn’t even have a coffee. A few years ago, I was there and while waiting spoke to a Catholic priest who actually was the son of former Conservative heavyweight W.J. (Billy) Brown. I remember that because I didn’t have money for coffee and I asked the good father if he would buy me a cup. He did. That is another story for another time.

For now, I am home safe and sound and good for another couple of thousand kilometres. At least I think so. There are no guarantees.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Part of the problem is that I am a townie who has been living out here in the country for half a century. It’s only in the woods up around Three Island Pond in Paradise and that is not exactly the Gaff Topsails, but it is beyond the comfort of the civilization of St. John’s. No municipal water up here. No sewerage system. You are on your own in the forest. To walk to a store from here to get a few beers or a block of butter is three kilometres each way. I did it once on a summer’s day about 15 years ago when my car wouldn’t start and my tongue was hanging out for a cold beer.

The truth is I hate Winter. It is horrible. I’m saying that although we had no real snow until January 2026 this year but God, we have it now. I was snowed in for two days this month. Winter in the country is really about trying to get by and stay warm and I’m “bet out” as the corner boys in St. John’s say.

I have in my possession now a snow blower, three shovels and a scoop. I have bags of salt, a couple of hammers, and a 12-pound mall. That’s because the roof in two different parts of my home doesn’t have a steep enough pitch on it. With every storm I take to the air when snow builds up on the roof. It HAS to be done or you’ll get an ice dam. I have swung around on an aluminium ladder in howling gales up there. It’s like some sort of weird circus aerial act. Luckily, those parts of the roof are only 12 feet or so off the ground. I also have two of those ice-melting cords that you plug into a socket to melt any ice dams that will occur. Those melt wires drive the little wheel around in the electric meter really quick.

That’s what I do out here in the woods. I try to keep the house warm and dry and safe. I shovel snow. I climb ladders. I melt snow. I have a snow rake that I got as a Christmas gift, which is excellent for hauling snow off the roof. I chop wood and I keep the stove in the basement lit. Apart from the wood chopping, which has “a Zen thing” attached to it, I hate it all. I’m SICK of it. Wet boots, wet mitts, wet socks and sweating like a bull every day are all part of a litany of what’s wrong with Winter here.

Hurry Spring. I want to see the 10-foot-high snowbanks on my road melt away. I want to see all the remnants of dogs from those people that walk their dogs around here show up again. I won’t mind. I WANT to see all those flyers that never quite made it to our door but got thrown into the driveway and were then covered up by snow. I’ll welcome them if even they are all about Christmas lights and specials on pails of salt beef now long gone. I’ll say hello and words of welcome as well to my nine iron, my putter, and 30 golf balls which are out there somewhere on my front property. I want to visit them again because I’ll know then that I’ve finally seen the back end of this ugly Winter.

I still remember all the big storms of my youth, the big sleet storms in the 1950s that shut everything down. We lost power for days and cooked in the fireplace. I have seen the pictures of snow piled up to the edge of roofs on houses, but that was more an issue of snow removal in those than actual tonnage on the ground. These days are worse.

We should confess now in terms of news we have done a full skiff and dory load of weather stories over the years. How cold it was, how hot it was, how windy it was, how much rain we have had, how little rain we have had. That’s all part of the world of news. Nobody in the history of news ever went broke from putting the fear of God into people about what might happen in the next 72 hours.

A couple of hurricanes and a few droughts have been part of our weather past in recent days. There have been extremes. I played tennis in Bowring Park one Valentine’s weekend and I got stranded in the snow with my son on Topsail Hill in a day that was mid-October. All of that notwithstanding the weather in those days never got me down like the current evil hand being dealt to us. Snow, snow, and more snow in the forecast. I am sick of shovelling. I am tired putting sheer pins in my snow blower and tired of making sure I have enough premium gas out in my shed.

Two of my neighbours who are senior citizens leave this Newfoundland in October and go to Florida and live in a trailer until April. I’m not at that stage yet but I’m thinking about it.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

When my brother John and I were very young, our mom and dad (mostly mom) warned us about the cooties. There are variations of it, but we were told that hanging around poor people there was something that you could catch. The disease was called the cooties. Looking back now I thought the whole thing was preposterous. One of my friends tells me that in his neighborhood they wrote the letters CP on the palm of their hand as a kind of charm. The letters meant Cooties Protected and was a kind of a visa that protected you from catching the cooties. We didn’t have that down around Pleasant Street and Atlantic Avenue. Related to that, for all of my youth I thought that the idea of the cooties was some kind of inner-city St. John’s thing and was only known downtown. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Cooties is all over the place. It is everywhere.

Mistakenly I thought for a while it could have been only a Newfoundland thing. No way. Cooties is something pretty close to universal and world-wide although the notion of it being a disease of poverty in Newfoundland seems rooted in St. John’s. A friend of mine heard of it in central Newfoundland when she was growing up. With her, though, it was something transmitted female to male but still somehow related to being poor and somehow related to a tick. It sounds harsh but, in the world, there is a relationship between poverty and disease with cleanliness being part of the equation. Disease doesn’t cause cooties but runs along with it without there being a causal effect. In our culture there was the notion of disease being of the poor. We were told tuberculosis and polio were two of those diseases of the poor.

It turns out cooties is a worldwide phenomenon even though it is a mythical disease. There is no such thing as cooties.

Despite that revelation it is referenced and written about in Canada and the United States and in Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippine’s. It is like similar afflictions in Britain, Italy, Iraq and India that have different names.

In lore a child is said to catch cooties from an infected person or from an opposite-sex child of the same age. The first reported use of the term in English came from World War 1 when the British referred to lice in the filthy battlefield trenches as the cooties. You might think I’m making this up as I go along but I’m not. The good news is that I never believed in cooties, no matter what by parents or the boys in the hood said. I always thought it was a crock.

I wouldn’t walk on a crack in a sidewalk. I always protected myself from the fairies by carrying a piece of bread when walking through a graveyard. I drew the line somewhere before the cooties. I never wrote CP on the palm of my hand. I just never bought the story.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca