Ian McDonald

My tutor at Cambridge, Professor Nick Hammond, authority on the history of ancient Macedonia and on the life of Alexander the Great, used to coach me on what he called “exercises of the mind.”

 There is nothing more valuable in man than an ability to write well. 

“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world.

Apart from having the luck in life’s lottery of inheriting good genes there are two sure ways to live a longer and healthier life.

Svensson Knut, Canute the Great, King of England from 1016, King of Denmark from 1018 and King of Norway from 1030 until he died in 1035, was perhaps the most successful and effective of the early rulers of England.

The debate on improving educational standards never ends. Let us consider what is meant by giving a child a good education in the total sense of the word.

The Stabroek News feature “History This Week” used to provide readers with a most valuable series of vignettes from Guyana’s past.

I divert from my usual Sunday column to make a few comments on the 2020 General Election which seems (but who knows) to be entering its final stage after suffering a tortured history since that day on March 2nd when everyone – everyone – was happy with a well-run, transparent, credible day of voting.

The insights of others continually add to our understanding of what is going on and how the world works. 

I do not like reminiscing about the old days – that immediately marks you as entering your dotage.

Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.

“The Voters’ Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Plotters’ Wit Shall lure it back to cancel the Result Nor all thy fraud and stall wash out a word of it.”

I have been re-reading a book of great beauty given to me as a gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean.

A birthday – even an 87th birthday which is leaving it a bit late in the day – is a good time to see if there are any aspects of life which need some sort of reassessment.

For 30 years I have published a column in the Stabroek News every week.

My 87th Birthday has come and gone. I hear old Sam Beckett’s pessimistic shout: “We breathe, we change!

I once read a long article about two remarkable books: “The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins,” published by the Clarendon Press in Oxford, and “The Early Poetic Manuscripts and Note-Books of Gerard Manley Hopkins in Facsimile,” published by Garland in New York.

I suppose it is getting older that brings this on but I have come to the conclusion in a long life that the high dramas of public events – the summits of great men who think they control events, the ribbon-cutting celebrations of immense enterprises, the coronations of Presidents and the inauguration of Parliaments, the inflated pageants of festivals and carnivals and celebrity occasions – fade into inconsequence compared with the quiet satisfactions of private life.

Staying at home and maintaining rigorous rules of isolation as one must in this time of plague – I find myself spending a lot more time in my library-study.

We are going through great traumas – a plague such as the world has not seen for a long time and, in Guyana, a blatant attempt to subvert democracy.