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Bandit Doesn't Drive Four-Wheel
User Rating:
/ 0The Problem of Trinity Part I
FROM where Saddle Road bends out of Maraval/Second Boissiere Village towards Haleland Park to where it bends up towards Santa Cruz, there’s a 400-metre stretch of straight road (five, if you go towards Moka golf course) and, with no live or sleeping police to slow them down – and definitely no concept of self-restraint on the part of their drivers – even lumbering old buses and trucks get up to 70mph, day or night; the BMWs, Audis and Porsche SUVs go even faster.
On my first morning in Haleland Park, I considered retracing the steps of the late Professor Julian Kenny, who would walk to the village to buy his daily paper and, in poignant newspaper columns that were totally ignored by
Crouching Badjohns, Hidden Tiger Balm
User Rating: / 0TRINIDAD STOPPED PRETENDING and actually became Hollywood this week, combining Clint Eastwood/Sergio Leone with Jet Li/Chow Yun-Fat, and turning 3.10 to Yuma and Hero into an ordinary weeknight burglary. And vice versa. The Wild West levels of crime that had the murder rate leap from zero to 19 in the year’s first week transmogrified into a gen-you-wine Hollywood Western last Tuesday night, y’all, with gunslingers in black – or at least black gunslingers – scaling building roofs a la Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with cases of orange juice on their backs, and Tec-9s in their waistbands.
And then, yes, there was an actual gunfight between bandits and security guards, the outlaws and the posse, at the
Errol Barrow Daydreaming
User Rating: / 0PUBLIC HOLIDAY – called a “bank holiday” in Barbados, because that’s what it’s called in Big England, and Barbados, after almost half-a-century of independence, still prides itself on being Little England – and I’m at my desk. Anyone who does it, like the painters I can hear outside, knows that, “working for yourself” really means “working on weekends and public holidays”. So I’m working – but I’ve just been given pause at my keyboard by my telephone.
As it popped into my head, before I remembered it was a public holiday, I rang Immigration in Trinidad to make a passport
The Devil You Know, Too
User Rating: / 0MOST days, with the exception of only birth- and paydays, I’m fairly content being myself (and even the birthdays compensate for being a whole year closer to my future absence with presents). Every now and then, though, somebody does something I notice, and I wonder if I’d be happier (or at least less miserable) being him or her. (I’m happy to be female, once I don’t have to fake an attraction to males, and once I don’t have to be a Muslim woman, apart from Malala Yousafzai.) Here is the list
I considered this week:
Kamla Persad-Bissessar
Advantages:
- oCan avoid every professional and personal obligation, from resigning over Section 34 to protecting own sister from being viewed as a locho jetsetter, and still wag her finger at everyone else for not living up to theirs
- oAssured of a damned fine salary until death, no matter how bad or good a job she’s done as PM
- oAlmost certain to have a comfortable retirement very soon
New Year's Resolutions Revealed
User Rating: / 0EVEN THOUGH we know they’re pointless, and even after some smartass, early in January (i.e., me, last week) shows how all New Year’s resolutions end up as the same old-same old in less time than it takes a West Indies middle order to collapse, we all make them. Today, I reveal the resolutions of several local public figures, with the makers’ own annotations to help them achieve their goals.
Because of national security concerns, I cannot reveal that my secret source is me, or that I have made up everything that follows below for your amusement, but I can remind you that last week’s TGIF named the top five New Year resolutions as: 1. Lose weight/Eat more