Ian on Sunday

What relationship between human beings is the most complex, deep, intense? 

Do you find, as I do, that as time passes you accommodate a vast sludge of useless information which remains stored in the brain for no purpose whatsoever?

A third of a New Year has passed away. This seems astonishing to me.

I am writing this column after reading about what has happened to Tony Judt.

Having long passed the Biblical span of three score years and ten, I realize clearly that this overtime gifted by the Gods must be very carefully husbanded.

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.