Ian on Sunday

Some of the best poetry has been written by people on the verge of death.

I consider myself reasonably well read and passably well-informed. I try to keep up with what is going on.

If you do not read poetry you miss much. You miss star showers around your head and arrows near your heart.

The world is suffering from giganticism. Bigger is considered better and biggest best.

Even in the worst of times – and who can doubt that the daily, brutal, unstoppable exploits of uncaught criminals have made this time one of widening and deepening fear and frustration – reading comes to the rescue by revealing other worlds of experience where cruelty and mindlessness and man’s inhumanity to man do not continually have the upper hand.

I have been writing about Shivnarine Chanderpaul for more than twenty years, even before he played Test cricket.

I have far exceeded the Biblical span of three score years and ten, so I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be most carefully husbanded.

Perhaps there has never been any time in history when terror, horror, cruelty and brutal suffering, much of it inflicted by men themselves, have set their curse upon so many lands.

The father of policing in Britain, and therefore of policing in Britain’s colonies, was Sir Robert Peel.

History often saddles people with reputations that are undeserved. Take Florence Nightingale.

One might have thought that as time passes the heart might harden as arteries harden and the sense of loss grow less acute as the five familiar senses most certainly tend to do.

In Guyana reciprocated animosity has not even come close to plumbing the awful depths which exist in so many other countries and, God willing, such hideous animosity never will prevail.

Intermittently through the year, 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.

Too many of my good friends are overwhelmed with work which prevents them living more peaceful, varied, interesting and fulfilled lives.

When you are long retired from the hurly-burly, you become more reflective.

I do not think the young, intelligent and opened-minded Minister of Education will mind me delivering again a little, well-meant lecture to her.

If ever a country needed more civility in the discourse conducted between its political and other leaders it is Guyana now.

One must be thankful that there are things to read other than the blood-filled and vitriol-laced pages of the daily newspapers.

This too shall pass. The utter shambles into which the administration of Guyana’s cricket has fallen will one day end.

Bill Shankley, manager of Liverpool Football Club in the English Premier League, was once asked whether a game his team was about to play was a matter of life and death.