Ian on Sunday

Last weekend my wife and I went up the great Essequibo to stay at the beautiful river-home of my brother-in-law and his wife.

Consider yourself fortunate if you are right 51% of the time.

Right now the temperature of partisan dispute, and tempers on all sides, are rising sharply.

At eighty years of age one must expect to factor attendance at funerals into one’s monthly (weekly?)

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

I was distressed in conversation with a friend whom I admire for his level head, his learning, his insight, and his wit to hear him speak of his sense of being cramped for intellectual space, of his boredom with what seems to him the narrow opportunities in the country, of his disgust at the eternal back-biting and bitter and belittling rivalries which crowd out any hope of civil discourse.

Many people go to the ends of the earth to find beauty.

I have been reading a book of great beauty given to me as a Christmas gift by my wife: A River Runs Through It, by Norman Fitzroy Maclean.

For God’s sake, what is going on? A young Pakistani girl is shot in the head for trying to educate herself and others like her.

We live in a world which seems to take little interest in joy.

I remember a very long time ago, in the era of Prime Minister, not even then President LFS Burnham, when I was a Director in the sugar industry, I had occasion to enquire from an official at the then State Planning Commission about a request made months before for  approval for the introduction of a new incentive scheme in the industry.

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

Out of infinite pain the mind of man can fashion beauty.

Winston Churchill, exasperated by opposition politicians constantly questioning his policies and his own credentials and frustrated by having to consult and compromise on measures which in his judgement were straightforward and ripe for introduction without hesitation, once exploded: “Democracy is the worst kind of government!”

One of the strangest paradoxes in the history of the human race is that while men have commonly dominated simply by virtue of their greater strength and aggression, women time and time again have been the cause of their downfall and defeat.

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet, whose marvellous collection of essays The Redress of Poetry I like to re-read, writes that WH Auden’s elegy for Yeats was “a rallying cry that celebrates poetry for being on the side of life, and continuity of effort, and enlargement of the spirit.”

One man is running a company with the help of three old family retainers, two others who haven’t had a new idea in a couple of generations, and a whole raft of school drop-outs.

There are some things that keep out the darkness that continually threatens in anyone’s life.

When I was young, and benefited not only from a fresh and eagerly absorptive mind but also from a strong belief that an eternity of life stretched in front of me, I loved to read big books, books of immense length.

Two weeks later I am still sweating with the initial nervousness and horror and still dancing in the final exultation of our victory in the World Cup.