When I was in the 5th form at Queens Royal College in Port-of-Spain, I think it was in 1948, I used to go with some of my classmates to where the 6th formers gathered during lunch hour to talk among themselves and express their considered opinions on the school, Trinidad, the world and the universe.
When he was nearly 90 Uncle Arthur learned I was in England on vacation from my job in Guyana and sent a message inviting me to crew with him in a yachting race in which he was competing.
I found people liked to recall the royalty of his name and nature but thought that King was too high and mighty so they named him a prince of men and that somehow seemed right.
Venezuelan dictator Maduro’s threat to annex Essequibo hurts my soul. I am particularly anguished by this threat because of all the many wonders in my life the great and beautiful Essequibo stands out most memorably.
In his great book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon, in writing about the reign of Titus Pius, commented in passing that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
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.”
Even at 90 treasures are available in what one reads.
● There is a scene in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence when the lovers, Ellen Olenska and Newland Archer, meet in the old Metropolitan Museum in New York in a deserted room containing antique fragments from vanished llium.
One man is running a company with the help of three old family retainers, two others who haven’t had a new idea in a couple of generations, and a whole raft of school drop-outs.