Last Wednesday, a letter to the editor appeared in the Express that was so poignant it made me abandon what I had intended to write. Exactly 25 years ago today, Daniel Bertie’s father, Trevor, was shot and killed by bandits in St Clair. “I remember everything. I remember his last …

For whatever reason, the Express posted my column last week (The Art of Forgetting) on its Facebook page with an introductory heading comprising these 30 words of the 900 I’d written. “I come from a Muslim family, and when I entered puberty I rejected Islam for telling me that menstruation …

A recent couple of conversations reminded me of how people find different ways to cope with trauma. The brain can introduce a kind of amnesia to block out emotionally shattering events. After a particularly loaded discussion, my friend said that she remembered so many painful things, that what surprised her …

“When you wake up in the morning, you never know what the day will bring,” she said. This came from a friend I have not seen in ages, and whom I had not noticed seated in the corridor full of people waiting for service at the Accident and Emergency Department …

Little things add up. Irritants that are not, of themselves, enough to make you feel besieged. Combined and constant, they are damaging to the psyche—the way water dripping away for years can erode rocks. Feral cats and stray dogs prowling the neighbourhood, stripping garbage bags and shredding the contents. Garbage …

I intended to write an open letter to the chair of the San Juan/Laventille Regional Corporation, Richard Walcott. Initially, it was to ask what the municipal body can do about the posse of feral cats that has overtaken the area. When the street was overrun by dozens of free-range chickens …

Imagine that you could have every single thing your heart desires. No restrictions. Do you think you could envisage it all at once? I mean, do you believe that on any given day you know precisely what it would take to make you absolutely content? Unlikely, I’d say at first, …

Seeing a big picture requires a lens shaped by multiple streams of information. If you live within the confines of a cave, everything you know is defined by its walls. Not so? It follows that how you respond to events is determined by the knowledge that you have to work …

Responses to the declaration of a state of emergency have predictably been draped in political flags. As usual, everyone knows what should be done, and just as in West Indies cricket, everyone knows where the blame falls. What continues to be apparent is that it is not politically expedient to …

We associate the idea of walking away from something as an admission of failure, of quitting, and giving up. North American films are famous for having protagonists proclaim that they will never quit. Generally, the idea that’s been sold is that one must stick to the thing at all costs. …

The final visit from the trio of Christmas ghosts takes Ebenezer Scrooge to a future—his possible future if he maintains his current pattern of behaviour. While Charles Dickens depicts this particular spectre as the most dreadful of the lot, it is actually the one who really represents the most hopeful …

Comparing Christmas past with what exists nowadays is something I wanted to do as a way of measuring change. It had been partly influenced by the memory of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, which was first published in December 1843. I’d thought the story of the miserly, mean-spirited Ebenezer …