Ian on Sunday

When I was a schoolboy we had a games-master named Mr.

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

I urge all those who can afford it – many thousands of you if you consult your heart first and only then your bank book – to make a gift of a new life for a destitute or homeless Guyanese child.

I have written often enough, and fervently believe, that cricket is an important element in our lives binding us closely together as West Indian nation – though I have to admit that recent West Indies cricket has displayed hardly any resemblance at all in the skill, camaraderie, spirit, pride and commitment to the game which once, win or lose, filled me with joyful anticipation, exhilaration and a sense of heightened patriotism.

When one thinks about it, the concept of ‘government’ is a strange one for it assumes as its fundamental premise that certain men and women – human beings like you and me – can and should be allowed to take upon themselves the right to direct the rest of us what to do, presumably for our own good.

I note with much pleasure that Viv Richards has been named by a very distinguished panel of 50 outstanding cricketers and writers about the game as the greatest ODI player of all time.

Are women, here at home and in our larger home, the West Indies, quietly but definitely taking over?

Politically, Guyana is not so much a divided as a completely sundered country from end to end and from year to year it seems for evermore.

A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life.

We are too obsessed by success, by deeds of glory and heroic feats.

Manifestos – by which we are shortly to be seriously afflicted – are viewed with grave scepticism by mostly everyone except those who painstakingly compile them.

And I am not referring to the menace of al Qaeda, IS and assorted deranged constituencies which cast a pall of horror around the world.

There was a famous occasion in Trinidad a few years ago when an audience, bored out of their minds by an interminable function, decided to take matters into their own hands and exited the seemingly endless and agonizingly dull proceedings.

Not the mindless killers they employ and brainwash but the brutal masterminds themselves know exactly what they are trying to achieve.

Gradually over the years keeping a diary has become a ritual in my life.

Recently I was sorting through old files and papers in my library in the process of sending them for deposit at the Special Collections Division of the UWI Library in St Augustine.

I was speaking not long ago to an old, dear friend, the Canadian Philip O’Meara.

  So many Christmas poems from which to choose. E U Fanthrope’s lines:   And this was the moment When a few farm workers and three Members of an obscure Persian sect

In a long life I have become accustomed to the usefulness of reading.

So much begins with parents. So much continues in the training grounds.