A new disease
Let me take you back about 10 years. I was living in Grand Cayman, with my Pomeroon background, out in the country on a big piece of land, and I would often take a break from my fruit trees to watch West Indies cricket. At some point back then, I had written a summary of [...]
Ah wha gwan
I love dialects. An Irishman in full cry, particularly under some drink, can be a pure joy, even though we may not understand half of what he’s saying; it’s a musical experience. A Glasgow man, as they call themselves, delivering a droll report on say, a soccer game, or a political issue, can actually have [...]
Pure bunkum
Some of the worst advice you can ever get in life often comes immediately after the expression, “Let me give you some advice.” Many of these pronouncements, frequently given with
Sweet discoveries
One of the most substantial planks in the structure of life is that of blind discovery – that sudden encounter with something so delightful that almost always the consequent thought is “Why didn’t I know about this before?” These new awarenesses come to us like a gift, adding small enhancements or significant ones to the [...]
Caribbean nutrition news
When I was youngster I worked for about three years at Atkinson Field (now Timehri) which was originally an American base. By the time I got there it had been handed over to our government and was our international airport, but there were still a few Americans about. I remember eating a guava one day, [...]
The elusive collective voice
When I first went to live in a big city in North America, my almost immediate impression was the astonishing level of order in the place. Trains and buses were clean and smartly maintained and operated on schedule. I was amazed to sometimes find myself the only passenger on a bus or streetcar late at [...]
How good we once were
I had completely forgotten that almost 15 years ago, living in Grand Cayman, I had sent my friend Colin Cholmondeley (then living in Jamaica) a short column from Wisden Cricket Monthly by BBC broadcaster and writer John Arlott on the West Indies cricket tour of England in 1950. Recently, with both of us now back living [...]
The absence of repose
When I returned to Guyana in 1968, after a gap of some 12 years, I was standing in my aunts’ shop at Hague Front, talking with a rice farmer from Hague Back who had known me from a boy. In the course of a rambling conversation comparing living conditions here and in Toronto, where I [...]
Keeping us safe in the air
I am going to assume that you haven’t been living in a truli hut in the Amazon, and you know that since the terrorism upsurge the airlines have these restrictions designed to keep us safe in the air. You cannot go on an airplane these days with anything looking like a knife or a weapon, [...]
Relay the praise
In the song “Angels Wings”, dedicated to Caribbean mothers, I am actually singing about the life of my own mother, Zepherina Barcellos, who left many impressions on me. From our youth, she implanted in her five children respect for elders, the importance of honesty, and the value of punctuality; it wasn’t just rhetoric with her, [...]
People in a grip
These columns I produce every week for Stabroek News are fun to write and fun, also, for the feedback they generate. Sometimes with a column that I expect to raise hackles – the “Our Habits Divide Us” piece for instance – I get the opposite response. On the other hand, the reverse often happens: an [...]
Scant hope for our cricket
Probably because of the many cricket songs I’ve written, people are given to drawing me out on the question of West Indies cricket. It is a matter that engages us all, and the more you talk to the people who know the more you see the complexities of it, and the more you see some [...]
It’s not just us
Some days, in fact most days, the barrage of distressing news on the pages of our daily newspapers is enough to cause despair if not clinical depression. I’m reading the newspaper of Friday 22 October 2010. As a rule, I am not a drinker, but the information I’m getting is enough to send me to [...]
Away and back
I love mutton curry. From the first time I sampled it at an Indian wedding on the East Coast donkey years ago, I was hooked; you can keep your chicken and even your hassar. In that vein, therefore, on my recent flight to New York to accept a Hall of Fame Sunshine Award for the [...]
Our habits divide us
Ignore all the corny Confucius jokes in fractured English; this was really a man with a startlingly brilliant mind about the human condition. He possessed the unique ability to distill very complex matters into a single sentence that captured the essential element of a condition. On the process of learning, for example, he said: “I [...]