Ian McDonald

I do not think the intelligent and opened-minded Minister of Education will mind me delivering little, well-meant lectures to her from time to time.

As golden afternoon transmutes into silver evening and then into velvet darkness fretted by stars I sit to read and think and dream.

One of the most serious aspects of life today is the widening gap between talk and action.

The world yearns for more and more speed – speed of exchanged communications, immediate access to information, concept instantly converted into conception – is destroying an important part of our lives.

As a companion volume to my planned book Portraits of Extraordinary people, I intend to add Portraits of Extraordinary Places.

In my column today I simply give two poems which I love and especially recall at a time when the world is awry – the pandemic unrelenting and tenacious and climate change unstoppably undermining all foundations – without those in authority seeming to know what to do or take decisive action as they interminably squabble.

I wrote this column long ago. I do not think I would want to change much, if any, of it now for it to be relevant – but I am anxious to learn if the Ministry of Education or educational experts can tell how things may have changed for the better.

It is necessary to repeat again and again that in the background of all our lives there exists a fundamental and dominating lie.

The title I gave to one of my collections of poems is Between Silence and Silence. 

I do not get the impression that governance in the world is good or that it is getting better.

Intermittently, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I like to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope.

Towards the end of life – and when you are eighty-eighty and counting you are not very distant from the end – you become more reflective.

Some years ago the London Times, on an exceptionally dull day for news, carried a story which it headlined “Small earthquake in Chile: no damage, no injuries.”

The world is endlessly fascinating, countlessly full of interesting people. Once at a party long ago I met a visitor to Guyana who turned out to be an expert on grass-hoppers.

Let me give my memories of one weekend at Cambridge University when I met two of the most remarkable men of the age, one after another.

There have been a handful of men who have made a deep and unforgettable impression on me: my father, first and always; Jock Campbell, Chairman of Bookers in the 1950s and 60s; Martin Carter, whose poetry time as it passes burnishes to a yet brighter gleam.

There are some people who are so much part of the world you know and feel secure in that when they die, meaning that they depart forever and will never again be part of that dependable world which you have known for so long, you feel a special loss that goes deep and you experience a sense of almost desperate longing that the death you have heard of will prove not to have happened and that the person will in fact be back in his place after all and that normality has returned.

When some years ago Colin Campbell, an old Etonian and quintessentially English, died at his home in Blackhorse Lane, South Mimms, in Hertfordshire at the age of 86 his death went almost completely unnoticed in Guyana.

It happens. It is life. Great contributions are made. Years go by and they are forgotten and those who made them are forgotten too.

In one conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee.