Ian on Sunday

For a short while one summer day out of nowhere in my life she flashed like a comet across my sky.

At thirteen, I think it was, I was reading love poetry.

From almost the first day I arrived in Guyana in 1955 I got to know Martin Carter.

These are no more than sparks snatched from the fire of their lives – encounters with men who were most memorable in my life.

It is extremely important that you pay attention to what today’s column says if you wish to live a longer, healthier, more alert and happier life.

When you get to 90 you are in overtime and a penalty shoot-out looms which you know you cannot win.

Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year into beloved lifetime rituals.

I am filled with sadness.  My old and dear friend Joe Solomon, great cricketer, great man indeed, has died. 

In a long life I have read the books and been taught the deeds and studied the scholarship and seen the art of the famous in many great countries of the world.

Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian poet who died at the sadly young age of 56, on receiving his Nobel Prize in the Grand Hall of the Swe-dish Academy in Stockholm in December, 1987, declared a great truth: “There is no doubt in my mind that, should we have been choosing our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programmes, there would be much less grief on earth.”

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

It isn’t an exercise that makes much sense to try and rank poets in a sort of hierarchy of greatness.

I long ago became convinced about two major things. They simplified the days that pass so quickly.

I have in mind compiling a book of brief pen portraits of Extraordinary People I have been fortunate to know in my long life – at least, a selected number of them since , to tell the truth, if you know anyone well enough and long enough everyone is remarkable!

I love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.

I do not think I am the only one to get the feeling that the world is heating up in more ways than one and spinning out of control.

I have always tended to think – against a great deal of evidence I must admit – that many other things are fundamentally more important than politics. 

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

At high tide, when the wind is strong, from my veranda in Bel Air Gardens I could swear the sea seems taller.

I wrote an essay thirty-two years ago which at ninety still has not lost its meaning.