Did Ewe Miss Me?

ME: “I’m back.”

YOU: “What?”, you say quizzically at the Other across the breakfast table. “I didn’t know she was away.”

ME: “Yessss…I was in Ireland and Newfoundland (which incidentally is an outpost of Ireland), continuing to work on a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

I mean, ewe didn’t even miss me?”

YOU: “Ummm….”

Yup, I just stepped out for a breath of fresh air and the next thing I knew I was in Newfoundland.
Before we get down to the whole point of this, which incidentally there probably is no point, the point of my trip was to first hit the Writer’s Festival at Woody Point, Newfoundland.

Oh, there’s no apostrophe in “Writers”.

Probably one of the reasons I needed to go.

Well, you know you’re ‘ere in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, when you get into your rental car and The Irish/Newfoundland Music Show is playing on CBC radio.

A minute later you drive past your second Tim Hortons…

and then realize that the only vehicles you are seeing are pick-up trucks.

When you roll in to get some breakfast, being gut founded and right crooked at 4 a.m.. Calgary time, but it’s 9 a.m. (9:30 in Newfoundland).

Newfoundland is so unlike the rest of the country, it might as well be the moon.

And they also do strange things to the Queen’s English, whipping up a sentence that would leave the best scholar reeling – but oh, such an enduring quality and so charming.

Although I had not sailed with ‘cod oil, passengers and chests’, I blearily hoped to unpack my meagre belongings and rest, as my eyes were like a captain goin’ offshore. But it was too early to check into my hotel, so some had to beaten the pat.

It was good day on clothes, so I decided to seek its colourful past and present.

Jellybean Houses to be exact.

I was soon to find out “that of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world”, and of all the villages in all of Ireland, I would soon be living in a village uncannily like St. John’s.

The Colourist Movement 

In 1963, San Francisco artist Butch Kardum began combining intense blues and greens on the exterior of his Italianate-style Victorian House. His house was criticized by some, but other neighbors began to copy the bright colors on their own houses. Kardum became a colour designer. He and other artists/colourists and house painting outfits began to transform dozens of the grey houses into “Painted Ladies.” By the mid 1970s, the “Colourist Movement”, as it was called, had changed entire streets and neighbourhoods.