You need to know, first, that there’s a young Trinidadian named Oliver Milne who made a very good short film called The Cost of Living, which was screened at the third Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival.

So, yesterday, now, chatting with a cinefile friend – she’d just returned my Cracker season one and hooked me up with Ashes to Ashes – and we were talking film generally and had moved to local TT films, mentioning Dalton Narine’s Mas Man and Mariel Brown’s The Insatiable Season before my mind segued – well partly – into local action films and, intending to praise what I thought were strong signs of originality in young Oliver Milne’s short film, my 51-year-old, rum-addled brain came up with the wrong Oliver.

 “Have you,” I asked my friend earnestly, “seen Oliver Stone’s The Cost of Living?”

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Saw a human being – he had human form, arms & legs, buttocks (most of which were on display), presumably some mother’s son – digging in a garbage bin this morning. Not finding anything to his liking there – he discarded styrofoam containers that looked to have contained barbecued something, curried something and stewed something – he moved on to the next garbage bin – more like a garbage bag on a metal ring, like a post-Apocalyptic basketball hoop – and dug in there. How nice, I thought to myself, that someone

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To my daughter's immense surprise, while we were in the US, I bought the new Green Day album, 21^st Century Breakdown. When I popped it into the car CD player, and cued up the song I'd heard them play at the Grammy Awards show, "21 Guns", she was rendered almost speechless. "No offence, Papa," she said (the usual clue that she is about to say something offensive), "but I thought you were too old to listen to Green Day."

"Green Day are closer to my age than yours!" I retorted. She didn't say it aloud but, even glancing in the rearview mirror, I could read her thoughts: Well, they sure don't look it!

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In December, I replaced the blind shading the porch from afternoon sun, which had simply broken when a house guest attempted to raise it. No undue stress, he just pulled the string the way he was meant to - and it broke. Since then, every time I raised the brand new replacement blind, I used one hand to operate the string and the other to assist the blind itself in going up .

Yesterday, now, for the first time ever, with my lunch on a tray in one hand, I attempted to raise the blind with one hand. The mofo broke at once. That makes almost US$100 spent on blinds that have lasted less than a year combined. And the fault is clearly mine for treating the blind like a blind and not a traumatized child of a war zone.

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After the Chelsea v Tottenham Hotspur game yesterday, I was trying to explain to my wife, who pays less attention to sports than she does to the rules of propriety, why her Uncle Greg, head coach & founder of my son's Pro Shottas football club wanted Spurs to come fourth in the Premiership - which is because he's supported Spurs since he was a boy in England and they've never been to the European Cup finals - and doing so would bring the Spurs money and experience.

With one ear on our conversation and both eyes on her new camera, which she's learning fast, but still on the steep end of the curve, she replied, "Wow, that's good. Imagine our nine-year-old son's little football club from Barbados getting into the European Cup finals!"

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Saturday mornings in Barbados, already dangerously overfilled with my son's football & karate and my own BC's B'dos deadline, tipped over today, with the return to my life of the English Premiership;  it was a better day for karate - my son achieved his second brown belt - than football.

My first live (on TV) football match as a Chelsea supporter would be more easily filed under Travesty than Triumph. We missed the first 35 minutes of the first half, en route to Uncle Greg's - the happiest Tottenham Hotspur supporter in Barbados this afternoon - so I watched about an hour-plus of the Chelsea-Spurs game, during which Chelsea condescended to play football for about seven minutes, three-and-a-half minutes on either side of Frank Lampard's goal near the end of the second half. Lowlights included Chelsea striker Didier Drogba being unable to make up his mind whether or not he'd torn a groin muscle in kicking off the second half (the fact that Chelsea had used all three subs apparently convinced him he was well) and the Chelsea captain, John Terry, making the absurd decision to commit an unnecessary foul when he was on a red card.

It's crap like this that sends you back to Man Utd; and makes you glad the season is almost over. Why do they call it "sports"? It could firetrucking kill you, supporting a football team.

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The more astute might already have noticed that the section that used to exist on this website, BC on TV - which was usually more ‘off' than ‘on' - has gone. The good webmaster has replaced it, at my request, with a dedicated space for the weekly feature, As Bajan as Flying Fish, which I do for the hard copy Thursday Barbados Nation.

 It features  one-sided conversations with Bajans from all walks of life. I've had a snow cone man and Tony Cozier in it - or, as Bajans would say, "It has had in Tony Cozier and a snow cone man".  The newspaper page can comfortably accommodate around 1,000 words and, often, I have to leave out some great stuff - but all the good bits get into BC Raw.com. (The Nation's website simply republishes the print version.) There will also now be a regular pic of the relevant Fish; making the perhaps dangerous assumption that I can master the art of putting it up.

 The most pleasant lanyap of the Flying Fish having their own net space, as it were, is it gives Thursdays back to the blog, which is nice. You never know whom you might need to shoot between the eyes (as it were) just before the weekend.

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If there's been a burst of radio silence, as it were, on the blog recently, it's because I was away on holiday and didn't want any would-be hi-tech burglars knowing it, so they could target our modest bungalow and make away with such consumer non-durables as two young children, four cats and three pothounds have not rendered un-fenceable.

I'm back.

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When I was 11 and in St Mary's College for the first time, I became a Chelsea supporter, largely because every boy in CIC supported an English first division team (at the league was then organised) and I liked the sound of the name Chelsea better than Tottenham Hotspur. Those were the days of Peter "The Cat" Bonetti in goal and Peter Osgood wearing the captain's armband.

In my mid-Twenties, I became a Man Utd supporter, not forsaking Chelsea, which has always remained my London club, but going with my mates at school, in the pub, in England - and the rest of the world. Manchester United, the Religion, is the most popular football club on the planet. For 20 years-plus, I backed the team that Georgie Best and Dwight Yorke played for.

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 In 1993, 17 years ago today, my father died. This is the third column I wrote about it. The first two appeared as last Friday's TGIF and the second as the blog in this space yesterday.

A Lingering Death

WELL, it's three weeks now, nearly, since my father died and everyone must be quite tired of it as a source of columns by now. "Okay, okay," people must be saying, "yuh father dead, let the man rest in peace and give us a joke, nuh, man. Is three weeks now. How long you will go on with this?"

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