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

The old pictures of St. John’s are nice, but they aren’t really close to capturing the heart of the city and the place I know and love. The “jellybean row” pictures are good for both tourists and us, but they are an affectation that have more to do with visitors than with us. Nothing wrong with them, mind you, but they aren’t the soul of the city. It’s a mid-1970s thing, if you ask me, like Screech-ins.

The older pictures from the poorer part of the west end of St. John’s, where I grew up, also don’t capture the city. Yes, the houses are real and the lack of paint on those houses in my part of town is also very real, but the pictures still don’t ring the bell for me. They are of a very narrow section of downtown St. John’s that has vanished and not a minute too soon. Good people lived there but, my God, it was extremely poor.

To me downtown St. John’s, more than anything else, had an atmosphere and aura to it. If you walked from Pleasant St. down to the waterfront there was more than sight and sound. There was smell. First there was the Horwood’s Lumber yard. There is a nice rich smell to newly sawn wood and it wasn’t all just pine, spruce, and birch. I know all about it because I worked at Horwood’s and worked at wood. There were some exotic woods down there.

Heading down to the harbour from our house you crossed first New Gower St. It was a busy street. Our family bought our meat at one of a half dozen or more butcher shops that were downtown in those days. Our butcher was Casey’s but there was also Metcalf and Roberts and Shields and Warrens Meats, and Max Lawlor’s and a load more around the city. They were all butchers in the old-time sense of the word. There was sawdust on the floor of the shops and there was the smell of fresh meat and a hint of blood. I also remember the butchers wore white coats. Your meat purchase was wrapped up in a piece of brown paper and tied up with a string. No plastic in those days. That would come later.

As a little aside story to this story, Casey the butcher on New Gower had the best sausages in the world. I haven’t tasted anything close to them since. We bought our meat there every payday which was Friday for Dad. He was a clerk on Water Street. Part of our weekly purchase was always a pound of sausages. Eventually, Casey sold the butcher shop to his top hand who I think was Mr. Tom Power. This is where the story turns sad. Tom didn’t live terribly long. A few years or so after he took over Casey’s shop he died. I don’t know if the shop was still operating then but I do know the recipe for Casey’s sausages was lost when Tom Power died because he hadn’t shared it with anyone. The Casey sausage recipe is something now lost to the ages.

There were also a lot of fruit stores in downtown St. John’s. There was Kenny’s, Lars, and MacDonald’s and many more. The proliferation of fruit stores meant that we had more than our share of exotic fruits for a small city. We had coconuts at Christmas and even corner shops carried apricots and grapefruits. My family had grapefruit almost every day at breakfast. I don’t know why so many fruit shops appeared, but I will guess it had something to do with trade of Newfoundland fish to the West Indies and the ships coming home laden with fresh fruit. The fruit stores smelled of “far away places.”

I can’t mention the smells of my city without talking about the harbour itself. I am old enough to have bought fresh fish down “in the cove” off Water Street. Steers Cove, I think. I’d be sent down for a 50-cent fish or a $1 fish. They were sold by real fishermen off planks stretched across two barrels. The cod, sometimes gutted with head on, would be wrapped in sheets of newspaper. That smell was the smell of Newfoundland. It was the smell of fish, and it was intoxicating.

Throw into all of these odours the smell of oil drums and cod liver oil and nets and coal on the wharves of the harbour and you have the scent of old St. John’s. This may not be accurate, but it doesn’t matter. It is the way I want to remember this old city. For background audio there was the sound of the steam whistles at Horwood’s and the dockyard and the sound and smell of locomotives as they shunted cars around the CNR rail yard. I do miss it all.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Fried foods and fatty foods were the order of the day. I myself was a good 40 years of age before the wagging finger of my doctor began to take any hold on me and it began to dawn on me that I should pay some attention to what I shoved in my gob. My doctor said if I didn’t, I’d soon find myself in the ER with someone putting electric paddles on me.

When I was growing up a “townie” in St. John’s there was little information available at all about diet and what information there was kicking around was generally wrong. My grandmother who used to give me home-made bread always covered it with about half an inch of butter. That was mostly margarine mind you, but butter once in a while! In the summertime you could buy butter at some places down the Southern Shore. It was known as “fresh butter.” It was homemade and so salty it glistened in the light. A “print” of fresh butter, it was called, and I think “print” came from the machine that shaped the round cakes of butter. It sort of printed them.

“Butter is the oil of the heart” my grandmother used to tell us. She obviously wasn’t a doctor. It was a cute expression but not well grounded in medicine and when grandmother finally went to glory and her eternal reward it was probably from a bad heart. By the way, another healthy offering from her as a snack was a slice of bread with butter and sugar.

Another fabulous thing we used to eat on a Sunday was salt beef. Four or five pieces of salt beef with cabbage, turnip, potato, and carrot. “Cooked dinner” it was called in some circles. I didn’t eat the turnip or the cabbage. I just had the potato mashed up with lots of butter and ate the salt meat. Five or six glasses of Freshie would be in order then because after a meal like that you would have a thirst like a camel.

Toutons was another staple in our horrid diet. That is bread dough flattened out and fried in a pan in fat. Fried bread is something that appears in so many cultures. The first time I was in China in the city of Ningbo at six in the morning I bought a treat from a street vendor. It was dough fried on the inside of a barrel over a fire. As soon as I tasted it, I murmured; Toutons!

Back to diet. In every pantry in our homes was a fat jar which was the drippings from everything fried, from bacon to sausages. It was saved and put away in case more fat was needed. People still do it, but they don’t talk about it. Sometimes bits of fat pork were served with toutons or in some parts of the province pork wasn’t used but the toutons were smothered in butter and /or molasses. Don’t tell me that isn’t good for you. Yummy!

Another favourite meal, and part of heritage, is salt fish and brewis. Again, there were two distinctive styles of that one being big bits of salt fish with fried pork on it or again, depending on geography, the fish might be all mashed up with the hard bread and nice dollop of molasses flung down on the whole thing. I think the pork thing with both the toutons and the fish and brewis might have been a Catholic thing and the molasses thing might be Protestant. I’m not sure about that.

Now all of that has had a lasting effect on me that manifests itself once in a while. I do eat better and I’m careful at least to some extent about what is for dinner. Once a year, or maybe once every two years, I break out and have what is still my favourite meal of all time. It is usually breakfast on a Sunday morning, and it is a bacon sandwich. Bacon by definition is no good for you. It’s the back of a pig. It is like fried strips of fat. I like to buy a package of those cheap bacon ends that they sell in the supermarkets. It’s about two pounds and is all the uneven parts left over from packaged bacon. It is cheap as dirt. Anyway, I like to put on a package of that and cook it in a big frying pan on the stove. When it done, I take up the bacon and drain some of the fat but not all of it out the pan. Then I get two big slices of homemade bread and fry that in the fat until its nice and brown. Then I make a sandwich with the bacon. A little bit of mustard, a tall glass of milk and that is about is close to happiness as I’m going to get. After that, a little nap on the sofa and you have all the keys to a long and happy life. Well, maybe.

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca

Now you know things are never quite as they seem in this old world. Lurking in the reeds of the most idyllic of popular stories there often lies a darker realty. Like many children my age I grew up with the marvellous world of the Winnie the Pooh books. Not the cartoons but instead the gentle children’s world painted by the stories and poems of A.A. Milne in books. They were part of my childhood. They were stories written by Milne for his only son Christopher Robin whom you will know.

My childhood background was such that the home life of Christopher Robin seemed to be a wooded paradise. It seemed a world where all problems were solved and characters like Winnie the Pooh and Kanga and Roo played in The Hundred Acre Wood through an eternity of warm, care-free summer days. Winnie the Pooh was funny, but he also represented innocence and a time in childhood when all things were possible.  I still have my copy of The World of Pooh from the 1950’s.  Stories from a perfect world written by a perfect father for perfect son.

“Hush Hush Whisper who dares.

Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”

They are lines in those books that convey a softness and ‘end of day’ peace in which A.A. Milne and Christopher Robin lived at Cochford Farm in Sussex, England. That “peace” I can tell you is a fiction so brace yourself.  Milne himself was saddened by the fact his children’s books had overshadowed his earlier work as a playwright. As for Christopher Robin, “little boy kneels by the foot of his bed” – he became estranged from his parents and life became difficult. He was an only child who became famous by virtue of being a character in his father’s works.

A.A. Milne and his wife grew completely apart from their son in later years which was a real tragedy. Christopher Robin Milne grew to resent what he saw as an exploitation of his childhood committed upon him by his father. Christopher Robin came to actually hate the books that made him famous. He got his revenge by marrying his first cousin, Lesley de Sélincourt. Christopher’s mother and Leslie’s father, who were brother and sister, didn’t speak after that for three decades.

“God bless Mummy. I know that’s right.

Wasn’t it fun in the bath to-night?

The cold’s so cold, and the hot’s so hot.

Oh! God bless Daddy – I quite forgot.”

Christopher Robin finally came to some form of truce and an accord with his father. Christopher visited him during A.A. Milne’s long illness and the rift between them was healed. When Milne died Christopher Robin had absolutely nothing further to do with his mother. Such was the great gulf in the family. His mother lived for another 15 years and even on her death bed refused to speak with him.

Christopher Robin himself grew to manhood and opened a bookstore in a small town in England. His friends knew him as Christopher and not Christopher Robin. He did some writing, including The Enchanted Places, that let him come to terms with his own role in the history of children’s literature. Christopher wrote “(it) combined to lift me from under the shadow of my father and of Christopher Robin.”

Christopher Robin Milne lived until 1996 and died quietly in his sleep at the age of 75. Thus, unhappily ends the story of one of the central characters from the world of children’s literature.  

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca