Ian on Sunday

It seems but a month or two ago that I was observing, with no great excitement to be sure, my last birthday.

A friend asked me how important a part poetry plays in my life.

I wish I could convey in particular to young people – whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the superficial, the transitory and the trashy – I wish I could convey to them the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitement of great poetry.

Headlines which constantly remind us of lethal crime heighten the sense of life’s fragility in all of us.

There are good signs that the cause of literature in the state is being championed more vigorously.

Again this year the Link Show was a huge popular success.

God is by no means infallible. She seems to have made pretty obvious errors in some of her attempts at creation.

Recently, a long-time friend, Dr Riyad Insanally, reminded me of how heart-beatingly exciting the prospect of great cricket matches and the matches themselves used to be.

Lately I made a visit up the great Essequibo to rest the body, refresh the mind and remind the soul of the beauty in this world.

Local government elections are coming later this year, possibly as early as April.

In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo. 

In a recent column I remembered my old friend HL ‘Bertie’ Taitt, one of a group of us who regularly met for rum, curry lunch and unending talk more than forty years ago.

There is an entry in my father’s diary which moved me deeply when I read it after he died.

Every moment in our lives is embedded in the extraordinary architecture of our minds.

In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize recently, President Barack Obama gave a magnificent speech justifying just wars.

Surely I am not the only one to have noticed that not long before India’s Test team rose to No.

Christmas is a time of joyful preparation. Over the centuries this has tended to become the shining-up and decoration of homes, the stocking up of food and drink for family and friends, joining in the merry round of parties.

I remember long ago saying to that warm and intelligent human being, Winnie Gaskin, Minister in the PNC government at the time, that I wasn’t interested in politics, that I grew bored by its petty complexities, that I loathed its sour and unbrotherly antagonisms, that I had better things to do than get mixed up in all the unsavoury manoeuverings that went into lusting after political power. 

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

for what else is there but books, books and the sea, verandahs and the pages of the sea to write of the wind and the memory of wind whipped hair in the sun, the colour of fire.