Ian on Sunday

More than normally, our politicians seem to be tearing at each other’s throats.

Currently cuss-down and buse-up are of a very low standard. We need new and more imaginative swear words.

When you get to my age you are in overtime and a penalty shoot-out looms which you know you cannot win.

Do you remember one of the world’s great exercises in futility?

It is astonishing to me that a third of the year is over.

I think there must be a majority of Guyanese deeply worried that the festering animosity between the political parties and the incessant jockeying for position and narrow-spirited search for partisan advantage is greatly harming Guyana’s progress as a nation.

A few weeks, it seems, since the last one, a new birthday has come along – the 81st no less, hardly believable when one thinks how not so long ago one could joyfully spring up stairs three at a time if the occasion demanded it or party until dawn (very possibly celebrating another West Indies victory as No.

The fatal flaw in the Duckworth/Lewis formula for deciding unfinished cricket matches is that it makes no allowance for genius, flair and sheer, joyous inspiration.

Democracies came to be based on a balanced view of human nature; people are by nature selfish but self-government is possible because we are wise enough to restrain and control that selfishness.

I was in Toronto with my wife to attend the wedding of a favourite niece.

If you can, every now and then it is good to escape the reality which you have settled into.

Like nurses anxiously watching the pulse rate and temperature of patients in an emergency ward, for a long time we were schooled to observe movements in Gross Domestic Product as the indication of whether a country is healthy or ailing.

At 80 years old I do not think I can be criticised for writing about ageing. 

Emeritus Professor Ken Ramchand of the University of the West Indies at St Augustine, eminent scholar and literary critic, the other day sent me the address he gave as Chairman of the Project Committee at the opening of The Naipaul House in St James, Port-of-Spain, on 10th February.

It is being noticed more and more – President Obama and Pope Francis are currently making it a theme in their speeches – that inequality is growing and that the already rich and powerful are becoming even more obscenely rich (the President and Pope are too diplomatic to use the word obscene but it is the right one) and even more unchallengeably powerful.

The feeling of joy is a strange emotion. It can derive from momentous events – winning the great championship, realising a long-nourished ambition, owning one’s own home at last.

It is generally accepted that self-righteousness is a most unpleasant personality trait and character flaw.

I have a dear friend whom I admire in all things and who herself writes beautifully and clearly but who has what I consider a blind spot.

‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ – Socrates.   When I was no more than twelve or thirteen the feeling grew in me that it was important not simply to live life day by day but somehow to give greater meaning to it by recording what was happening every one of those days and by planning how I should shape and what I should make of my life in the future.

Recently I paid a visit to Trinidad and while there made a remarkable discovery.