Ian on Sunday

The list is long in Guyana of problems needing solution and the list isn’t shortening.

In two of the main centres of democracy, America and Europe, democracy is rapidly failing.

I remember ‘Read to Succeed‘ was once the theme of the activities and exhibitions organized to celebrate the work of library services for the children of Guyana.

How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a square cut by Gary Sobers or a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai.

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

More than sixty years ago – can it be so many years, gone so quickly, insubstantial as a dream?

The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words.

I have written often about the importance of using clear, accurate language in explaining the problems that face a nation like Guyana.

“We receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters, and one from the world.

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

Like a stampede of wild horses on a dirt highway, daily events in the constant chaos of their unfolding kick up a vast obscuring cloud of dust and smoke.

I first played international sport when I represented Trinidad in lawn tennis as a schoolboy in 1949.

It is understandable that newsmen look for sensational stories since these are what sell newspapers and make the names of correspondents.

There is literally no problem in Guyana which is more intractable than the problem of bureaucracy in all its deadly guises.

The saddest sight in sport is to observe a marvellous athlete not so much go into decline as suddenly burn out before one’s eyes.

I find it hard to understand why most people never, literally never, read poetry.

In his great book Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon, in writing about the reign of Titus Pius, commented in passing that history was “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

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

When I was young I played a little cricket. Indeed, one of my most precious memories, a memory now more that sixty years old, is of playing for my school third eleven on a rough pitch up at Mount St Benedict in Trinidad and taking five wickets in one eight-ball over with some slow cunning off-breaks which did not turn – they were an early incarnation of the doosra.

Certain words are beloved of bureaucrats: words like monitor, check, regulate, review, classify, and control.