Wellness

I never forgot the last time that I saw Imran Khan—my former St Mary’s College classmate, not the cricketer. We were on the second floor of the school one morning, and I heard a buzz in the corridor. I looked up to see Imran walking towards me with a blood-stained …

Roughly 16 years ago, I interviewed Dr Dan Ramdath, a professor of Biochemistry at The UWI, about the efficacy of olive oil, given its superstar status as a healthy food. He is currently the director of research and a clinical research scientist (Human Nutrition) at the Guelph Research and Development …

Today, when I look around in the world, what do I see?/ I see footprints that man has left on the sand/ While walking through time./ I see fruits of our ambition, figments of our imaginations/ And I ask myself, When will it end? When will it end?/ It is …

When Professor Emeritus Arnold Rampersad spoke to graduating students of the Faculty of Humanities and Education at The UWI in 2009, he drew their attention to the notion of Self. Casting himself in the role of a “scholar-critic committed to biography and autobiography” (for which he is globally acclaimed), he …

Chapter 1: Tiny Weird Identifiable Lump (TWIL)… TWIL showed up in April—or rather I found TWIL in April. It is strange because self-exams were not a routine for me even though I knew the importance. I always had dense tissue and would get an annual ultrasound just to make sure …

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 …

In a Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), Rebecca Solnit wrote of the places in which one’s life is lived: “They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and, in the end, …

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 …