Bully boys and ‘turning the buoys’: it’s a pivotal date for the summer

August 2024

The Royal St John’s Regatta is scheduled for Wednesday, August 7 – or, famously, maybe not. There are a lot of distinctive facts and singular traditions linked to the event: it’s longevity (dating to 1816), it’s association with the Newfoundland Regiment, even the pronunciation of the lake it is held on, but it is also the only holiday in North America to be determined by a civic committee. They study the weather, particularly wind conditions, and make the call at 6am. Hence another ritual: Regatta Roulette.

(Painting above: Regatta at Antwerp, 1906, by Othon Friesz)

NQ Update

All the Joys of the Season!

Meet you back here in January. Our first conversation in 2021 will be with musician Alan Doyle, who tells us of his new collection of stories: “It sort of became…

BooksEssay

POWER/GRID: Graphic Depictions of War

BY Andrew Loman

“I chose a grid-system rather than free-form because it was a history. To me there’s something very stable about the nine-panel grid and I wanted that feeling for it.” So said the St John’s cartoonist Wallace Ryan, explaining the page design he has chosen for The Narrow Way, a graphic memoir about his grandfather’s experiences as a soldier in World War 1.