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Monday, 06 September 2010 01:23 |
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IT'S THAT TIME of year again where you're torn between not wanting the most recent hurricane to come anywhere near Barbados but still desperate for any little breeze that drifts by. To say it's hot would be an understatement along the lines of saying Gabby tucked in Admiral Nelson's shirt for him at Cohobblopot last month. As they say in Trinidad, it ain't joke hot, it seriously firetrucking hot. This is weather that could make tourists nostalgic for winter.
The only creatures happy in Barbados are the lizards: they can warm their blood in ten minutes in the morning and go back to sleep for the day. I look at our poor cats, dressed head to toe in fur coats and almost despair for them. Guinness, so named because
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WHAT (BAJAN) POLICE CAN DO |
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Monday, 30 August 2010 01:15 |
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ONE RAINY SUNDAY night, I picked up a friend at Grantley Adams airport. In what Derek Walcott might call driving rain, all the way from Top Rock roundabout, I'd seen only one other car. It was near 10pm when, at the Tom Adams roundabout, I saw my friend, the only figure waiting - in front of ‘Arrivals'. He did not know only buses and taxis are permitted to use the inner lane and that, as he was being picked up by an "ordinary" car, he was under a duty to cross that first road and wait on the island between the two lanes.
As I swung under the airport roof, from the Caribbean Airlines check-in to the food court, the only person I could see was a female airport police officer opposite me. I looked directly at her and our two eyes made four, as they say in Trinidad; and then I made the crucial mistake of looking away from her and directly at my friend, standing all alone next to his suitcase 300 metres away, on the pavement on the ‘wrong' side of the road. The policewoman's eyes followed mine and, in a flash, like a star defensive linebacker scrutinizing the quarterback's eyes, she read the play.
She started running
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Monday, 23 August 2010 11:37 |
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AT PAGE 311 of the Hitler biography I'm reading, I still had 658 pages to go - and this is the condensed, single-volume, almost 1,000 pages shorter than the two-volume Hitler, 1889-1936, Hubris, and Hitler, 1936-45, Nemesis. At the invasion of Poland (1 September 1939, 71 years, one week and one day ago), I imagined the trepidation of the people of Germany and Europe at being taken, only 21 years after the end of World War I, and by a single madman, into another continent-wide war.
For those who remembered the 1916 Battle of the Somme - in which almost a million soldiers died
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 August 2010 18:01 |
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Monday, 16 August 2010 16:35 |
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TWO WEEKS and one day ago, Crop-Over Sunday, I was excited about my first Crop-Over. By two weeks and 23 hours ago, disappointment had set in as firmly as Dessie Haynes facing Canadian change bowling on a flat pitch. Crop-Over was seriously underwhelming. Except only for the Landship band, it's difficult, based on what I saw, to understand why anyone would want to take part in ‘Crop-Under'.
Having played mas in Trinidad, I can see the appeal for the person in costume - but the price band-members pay for a bathing suit they would refuse to wear at the beach, a handful of sequins & glitter and
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Monday, 09 August 2010 11:41 |
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"SOMETHING'S HAPPENING" could be the greatest Bajan song of all time. It's one of those magical songs - like "Calypso Music", "Sweet Child O' Mine", "Purple Haze", "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay", "Imagine", "Samba Pa Ti" -whose melody almost alone conveys its whole import to the first-time listener instantly. You hear "Something's Happening" and time stops. From the first note to the last, you're transported direct to the collective unconscious whence all Art arises, that wonderful place where even the greatest doubter knows God for sure.
So, when RPB sang "Something's Happening" at the Plantation on Crop Over Saturday night, I dropped all my cares and threw my hands in the air. The back injury that
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