Ian on Sunday

I wonder what it would be like to exclude sport completely from one’s life for, say, one year?

Recently I read two poems which I want to share without much commentary – partly because they speak for themselves.

There is a never-ending battle against those who think – no, who are sure – they know what is best for us.

I like to tell the story of Tony Judt. Tony Judt was a writer on recent world history whom I greatly admire.

The work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1953) is hardly known to English-speaking peoples.

Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success.

My wife’s garden is as much a work of art as a painting by a master spirit or a poet’s inspired sonnet or a perfectly composed piece of music.

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

In a book written on Voltaire I learn of his beloved mistress Madame de Chatelet.

Concern is constantly expressed about break-downs in the nation’s infrastructure. Previous long-term economic malaise led to wide-spread structural deterioration which is with us still.

As I grow older – 83 tomorrow – bloodied but not completely bowed, a passage from Shakespeare comes naturally but ominously to mind.

When I was young I was ready and eager to follow the advice given by Terence, the Roman poet, a long, long time ago: “I am a man,” he wrote, “and therefore anything that any man does should interest me.”

Karl Popper, one of the greatest thinkers of his, or any, age, was modest in expressing his philosophical findings.

I know from our newspapers, and from many a conversation, that our political masters and mistresses are going at each other in Parliament and elsewhere as they always have and, apparently, always will, except for Sam Hinds who I find maintains a calm dignity even in his  most adversarial communications which no one else seems able to achieve.

The saddest sight in Guyana is the children you see on the pavements begging, idling, cursing, selling cigarettes and sweets, most of them on their way to perdition of one sort or another.

When I was a boy there was an old, tall, craggy-faced priest from Scotland who used to preach on Sundays at the parish church in Tunapuna in Trinidad.

I was reading the magazine Planet the other day and came across an article in it by the Welsh poet and playwright Damian Gorman which made an impression on me.

Local election campaigning is presumably underway. The exchanges will not be civil, to say the least.

Bertolt Brecht was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th cen-tury.

I wish I could convey in particular to young people, whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the transitory and the trashy, the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitements of great poetry.