Ian on Sunday

If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart.

Like a stampede of wild horses on a dirt highway, daily events in the constant chaos of their unfolding kick up a vast obscuring cloud of dust and smoke.

I first played international sport when I represented Trinidad in lawn tennis as a schoolboy in 1949.

It is understandable that newsmen look for sensational stories since these are what sell newspapers and make the names of correspondents.

There is literally no problem in Guyana which is more intractable than the problem of bureaucracy in all its deadly guises.

The saddest sight in sport is to observe a marvellous athlete not so much go into decline as suddenly burn out before one’s eyes.

I find it hard to understand why most people never, literally never, read poetry.

In his great book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon, in writing about the reign of Titus Pius, commented in passing that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

I long ago became convinced about two major things. They simplify the days that pass so quickly.

When I was young I played a little cricket. Indeed, one of my most precious memories, a memory now more that sixty years old, is of playing for my school third eleven on a rough pitch up at Mount St Benedict in Trinidad and taking five wickets in one eight-ball over with some slow cunning off-breaks which did not turn – they were an early incarnation of the doosra.

Certain words are beloved of bureaucrats: words like monitor, check, regulate, review, classify, and control.

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

Suddenly I am seventy-nine years old.  I find that ridiculous but chronologically it is a fact. 

The old Common Entrance is history and, I hope, a bad memory.

The end of the word as some of us know and love it is close.

I once read a good book called The World According to Garp by John Irving.

Again this year the Link Show was a huge popular success.

The world is endlessly fascinating, countlessly full of interesting people. Once at a party long ago I met a visitor to Guyana who turned out to be an expert on grasshoppers.

It happens. It is life. Great contributions are made. Years go by and they are forgotten and those who made them are forgotten too.

So much begins with parents. So much continues in the training grounds.