For the last few nights, my wife and I have been enjoying an English television series, watching two or three episodes back-to-back. It’s not grade A, life-changing television that is or approaches art and makes you ponder your own existence, like, say, the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or the English Office. It’s not even very high second-level stuff that occasionally of often touches the very highest peaks, like Gavin & Stacey or Boardwalk Empire. But the story is fairly strong, at least for all of season one, and the production values are extremely high and it is centred on the relationships between those with power - the English aristocracy who do nothing for their money, just have it to spend - and their servants. It is set in what the English tourism industry calls a “stately home”, from which the series takes its name. They are normally called “Something House”, like Chatsworth or Badminton House, but other names also feature, like Calke Abbey, Carlton Towers, Knowsley Hall or Wentworth Abbey, the name of the area in which the palatial home is set supplying the first word in its title.

Well, this particular series is very popular and you have probably have heard of it. It stars Maggie Smith in a wonderful secondary role that

Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, croaked yesterday and the news reports around the world were filled with nothing else - or, at least, around the world outside of the USA. In the US, there was more interest expressed in the record performance of the stock market or in a cat stuck in a tree than in the passing of the most high-profile leader in the hemisphere after President Obama. On the BBC and Le Monde and Aljazeera everything ran towards Caracas; in the USA, the White House’s press released decline to even mention the late Venezuelan president by title, and certainly not by name. (I guess this is what you get for calling George Dubya Bush the Devil at the United Nations.)

But while news media around the world (outside of the USA, i.e.,) focussed on the expiration of Hugo, blogs around the world could not

My pardner, Jeremy, is fond of remarking, often apropos of nothing, that it takes seven seconds to die. It can take a lot longer, of course, and some deaths are even faster - I’m kinda hoping for an instant one myself - but I missed one such seven-second period this morning.

I’d just dropped kids to school and was coming out of a T-junction on to a busy road that motorists treat as a short expressway, although in a built-up area - coming out of Fifth Avenue onto the Belleville main road, for the Bajans. A small van that

Tomorrow makes it 25 years, as measured from Friday to Friday, that I’ve been writing Thank God It’s Friday in the papers in Trinidad & Tobago. Hard to believe; even for me, and I’ve been writing it.

The question I get asked the second-most is, “How do you think of something to write about every week?” (The question I get asked most is, “You is the fella who does write in the papers? I was expecting somebody more taller!”) I always answer

The nagging calf injury contributed to my decision not to return to the Savannah on Sunday to hear Phase II, at least, on the Track; but the main persuading factor was the nagging suspicion that, to remain in the Savannah, even with the sweet pan sound, I’d have to start drinking; and, now that I’ve got to the stage/age where every bout of drinking to excess leads to a day of suffering, I made the call that not even pan could be worth it. You have to know yourself and I know I’d have had a drink; and, in the Panorama context, rum come like