Circular No 42

Not yet located
-------------------
-------------------

Circular No 41

Not yet located
--------------------
--------------------

Circular No 40

Newsletter for past alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago.

Diego Martin, 17 of August 2002. Circular No. 40
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,

This newsletter is being prepared from Trinidad. I finally did get to the island, leaving the work and stress in Venezuela.

The trip was uneventful, I started on the trip on Monday, 11^th with my daughter Viki (13) early in the morning to avoid traffic in Caracas; we arrived in Pto. La Cruz about 300 km away at about 10am, where I met Hector Ahow (those that were at MSB in the mid 1960s would remember him) and family and left Viki while I moved to a meeting with the chief of communications of the local cellphone company to discuss the possibility of giving a workshop on obstruction lighting systems and the controllers that we manufacture. After the meeting I had lunch with Hector while Viki had a great time swimming with Hectorʼ s daughters.

In the afternoon I went to Hectorʼs office which is close by, but the traffic was horrible, strange for the resort city. After being stuck for a few hours at his office we decided to walk back instead of using the car.

Later in the evening the TV news showed the reason for the traffic stoppage. Students from the local University had taken their transport buses and placed them across the main road and only intersection of the city, effectively blocking traffic in all directions. They were protesting the lack of action by the judiciary and local government in a multiple run over and a death by a drunken driver that ran over four students two days before.

We closed the day with a barbecue and the arrival of additional friends.

Next morning I had another meeting at the main offices of our Venezuelan oil company, PDVSA. This took about two hours. We took to the road towards Cumana where we arrived about midday, ate lunch and went to the local Airport for a show of the flag, but we did not meet anybody.

On the road again, this time to Carupano we again encountered a traffic blockage, this time local citizens of a small village were protesting a company that was about to scavenge a large cargo ship near by. Although we never found out the real reason, we stood for close to two hours in the middle of nowhere while authorities, police got rid of the burning tyres and re-established traffic flow.

Upon reaching Carupano, again to the Airport, and we did meet the local authority, had a chat and returned to the road towards Rio Caribe and our goal Guiria.

But again a turn of fate about half an hour out of Rio Caribe the road was closed. The reason was because local residents of a small village had physically cut the road about two weeks before because after a strong rain lasting hours their houses were flooded and their only solution was to cut the road to let the dammed up water to recede. So far so good, but why were there no signs indicating that there was no through traffic from Rio Caribe to Guiria??

So we drove back to Carupano and took the alternate the road to the south to Guiria, a loss of nearly two hours. This added to the two hours already lost, totalled four hours, so instead of arriving at 5pm we arrived at 9pm. I do not mind driving in the dark but I prefer to drive during daylight to enjoy the sights.

We spent the night at a nice small hotel, we were rather tired after so many hours sitting in the vehicle.

Next morning we went to the office of the Pier #1 ferryboat and bought tickets, 46 USD one way.

The ship left the docks at about 3pm. For the 3 ½ hour trip to Pier #1 docks, which was uneventful.

The trip was over once we saw our friends at the TT dock.

---------------------------------------------------------------

So now I am in TT, enjoying my friends hospitality and my daughter is with girlfriends of her age at another home, trying out the tricks her mind and tongue learned at her English language class at school this last year.

Now off course you are a bit annoyed, as you want to know not about my trip but about the contacts I made here in TT these few days. So here is the part that you want:

On the 15^th I started calling friends of my class 1960 and others on the list. I called Roger Henderson at the Bank but was told that he retired, but were kind enough to give me his new telephone number. I got hold of him and we agreed to call each other on Monday. The same situation with Michael Herrera.

I went with my hosts to the Trinidad and Tobago Sailing Association on Thursday morning and was rained out by midday.

I called in the afternoon my good friend Graham Gonsalves, and oldboys Alfonso De Lima, Stuart Henderson, Jean De Melliac, Capt. Jeffrey Gransaull and Gerard Kenny with whom I had a nice chat.

I left a message with Vernon De Lima

Going to meet Dr. David Bratt for lunch on Monday or Tuesday.

Had lunch with Rene Bermudez at the Chaguaramas Golf Club on Friday.

On Saturday I had lunch with Capt. Robert Date, BWIA, at Trinidad and Tobago Yacht Club, ( old Royal Yacht Club), where I also met by chance with Robert De Verteuil.

My plans for Sunday are to go with my hosts to Maracas Bay and Las Cuevas in the morning until we get rained out. It does rain every day, the accustomed 5 minutes on and 15 minutes off.

Monday will be dedicated to the Piarco Airport and Mt. St. Benedict.

In the morning I may go to see Denis Gurley, and Abraham Laquis who invited me to their offices in Pos, but I do not know if I can make it.

In the afternoon I am going to msb with Michael Dʼornellas, hope to get good photos and meet Frs. Benedict, Cuthbert, Augustine and maybe others.

In the evening I am going to meet Alex de Verteuil.

The plans for Tuesday are not set but that would be my last day in town. The ferry leaves at 9am on Wednesday.

Left my number for Robert Azar, and others, I feel that time is going to be short to be able to meet them.

Gordon Mitchell was in Tobago.

Judge Anthony Lucky, Richard Gransaull, are out of the country.

Eddie Hares, tried but no answer on the phone.

Tried to make new contacts with David Strisiver, George Laquis, John Abraham, but no luck.

I may have missed out on some of the names as I made close to a hundred calls, but you all know that the telephone book does not reflect the uptodate changes, and that some numbers just rang and rang without answer. So until next week for the second part of my enjoyable eventful trip to TT.

God Bless

Ladislao

Sorry no photos or columns.

Circular No 39

Newsletter for past alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.

Caracas, 10 of August 2002. Circular No. 39

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Friends, here is news from a long forgotten CD made by a Choir The Assumption Folk Chorale directed by our friend and old boy Nigel Boos.

Here is the story on occasion of a new anniversary.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Las,

I'd very much like to be there with my friends, but my present financial condition does not permit a visit to Trinidad at this time. So I'll just have to leave it alone, I think, and wish everyone who attends lots of love and peace and happiness. I've already communicated this to the group, but I'm quite sure they can get along fine without me.

The last time I met with the Choir was in 1985 when I was asked to conduct them for the 15th Anniversary Celebrations at Assumption Church. It was really something special. When I walked into the Church for the practice, I could hardly believe it - - - so many of the "kids' had turned up that 1/3 of the church was filled with Choir members and their husbands / wives and muchos ninos. I felt a great lump in my throat and when I got to the podium eventually and started them off on one of our old favourites, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", the years simply fell away. it was as if they hadn't missed a beat since my last meeting with them 11 years before. The Choir has formed an important part of my life, Las, and I believe that God must have used me to draw some of his children back to him, through music. Many of these young people are today extremely active in the Charismatic Renewal in Trinidad and elsewhere, so maybe we did have an effect, after all.

Can you make a story out of all of that?

Nigel

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Las,

This isn't really a news item. But for the record, it's just a record I made with a choir I founded in 1969 by the name of "The Assumption Folk Chorale".

The Choir operated (and probably still does) out of the Assumption Church in Maraval. At the time of founding it, I had intended it to be a forum for teenage religious expression and no effort was ever made to exclude anyone of any faith whatever.

Basically, I tried to encourage youngsters who wanted to meet together in a communal spirit to praise God and to enjoy one another's company.. We had blacks, white, pinks, browns, yellows, greens, purples, reds, and practically every hue of the human condition. We had a wonderful time, and the record was one of our productions intended to document the fact of our existence, and to demonstrate new forms of praise and worship.

The teenagers of 1969 -1974 are now turning 50 and they're having a get-together in Mayaro in August 2002. I understand that they're coming together from many parts of the world for the occasion, and they'll be attempting to celebrate the mass using the songs we loved back in the distant past. So much for the news item.

Good luck in all your efforts, Las.

Nigel

---------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Salvador,

Thank you for your kind words and for the memories. I agree, our days at MSB were special, although perhaps we didn't think so at the time. It is wonderful to see how Ladislao has been able to bring so many of us together through the use of the computer.

The record you're referring to was made back in 1970 and it seems to have become a sort of rallying point for the teenagers of those days, who are getting together again next month in Trinidad to celebrate their "Group Age 50" since so many of them are turning 50 either last year, this year or next year.

Thanks also for the invitation to contact you in Louisiana. May I extend the same courtesy to you if you should happen to pass through Ajax, Ontario.

God bless, and keep the faith.

Nigel

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Salco56@cs.com, wrote:

Hello Nigel, it has been a very long time. My name is,Salvador Coscarart and my brother Pedro, we both went to the Abbey School in 67 to 75.

We are from Venezuela, two years ago we went to visit our sisters and she gave us back a record that I had purchased in Trinidad, it was one of your records and your Choir, I also found a picture taken at the abbey refectory during a mass with the boy scouts and your Choir, Father Cuthbert was saying the mass and you were standing behind him.

Just wanted to tell you hello and Iʼm glad to know you have done good for yourself, I have been in contact with, Tony Johnson and Ladislao, it is also nice to have met new oldboys from Mount, I live in the USA now in Louisiana, Lafayette. if you ever come around this way you are welcome, my phone and address are in the Abbey School Web, best wishes God bless

Salvador Coscarart Msb Old Boy.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those that like to collect Choir music, please contact either Nigel or Salvador. CDs are part of our history.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Continuing the Who is Where,

28. Allan and Kirby Peters has a Poultry farm near San Fernando.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

For my next circular I shall be in TT and hope to have new information for you, specially those that are not in the island.

In the photo: Matias Fedak, Ladislao Kertesz, Guiseppe Braggio, Enrique Castells.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

God Bless

Ladislao

------------------------------------------------------------------

Listado: C39.xls

Photo: mycp3,

9 Tugs & Lighters

Column: 020721 wvb Waiting for it I

-----------------------------------------------------------------

ATTACHMENTS:

Waiting for it
(Part one)

by Wayne Brown
Sunday, July 21, 2002

IT was only mid-morning, but from the back porch of the house in the foothills the mountain was already vague with heat. Above it the sky was colourless, almost white, with ill-defined blotches of barren grey cloud; and in the opposite direction, down the long vista over the roofs of the city, the waterfront skyscrapers and the ships in the harbour were discernible only as indistinct, blue-grey shadows.

In the garden the impatiens, planted in the shade of the palms soon after Christmas when the sun was in the south, had lost most of that protection now it was summer and withered. For a time she had tried to save them by assiduous, twice-a-day watering; but inch by inch the petrifaction had crept along their stalks, and in the end she had given up.

Indeed, the garden as a whole was beginning to show signs of neglect. The lawn was dry and turning brown in patches, and the pods of the Poinciana lay where they had fallen, split and eviscerated. (By what? Patricia wondered with a shudder: Rats? Rats coming out at night?)

"So long as there's electricity," she said into the phone now, "I can take it. But once the power goes, that's the limit."

There was no response. Patricia wondered what her listener was thinking; but she was too reserved to ask.

The sound of the front door opening startled her; she had not expected Brian home, and hadn't heard his car.

"I have to go," she said, with a sudden odd note of spitefulness in her voice that seemed uncalled for and was not like her. And she rose from the high stool, returning the phone to its cradle and turning to the door in one continuous motion.

"Electricity gone?" Brian asked peremptorily, barging into the kitchen. He was a burly man 10 years her senior, with a bluff manner, a round forehead, and protruding ears.

To Patricia it sounded somehow like an accusation. "As you can see," she said levelly. "It's been gone for nearly an hour." Then: "What are you doing home?"

"Frankson wants the Costa Rican file; he thought I had it in the office. I thought I had it in the office. But it's here."

He reached into the dark fridge, took a swig from a mauve plastic bottle, returned it to its shelf and closed the door.

"Do we know if the street's without power?" he inquired. "Or is it just us?"

Patricia thought: We? Who is this 'We'? And -- not for the first time, it had been occurring more than once of late -- for a moment her husband of eight years seemed to her a complete stranger: an insolent and repulsive intruder into her life.

"I don't know. I think it's the whole street," she said. "But I might be wrong."

Nowadays, it was only when she saw him with the children that she was safe from the hallucination that, as in a nightmare, she had somehow stumbled into a parallel universe where the imp of Unmeaning was forever jeering at her. When after dinner little Tanya shyly showed him her drawing of frowning, long-lipped Miss Oates, or Pierre got into his lap and told him complainingly to stop watching TV, and he laughed and tickled him, before returning his attention to Seinfeld or Cheers or whatever (while the myriad bits and pieces of the child, which had flown off in every direction, mirthfully, tearfully reassembled themselves, and he began again, Daddy. Dad-dee!): at such times her husband seemed to Patricia like someone she had long, if impersonally, known.

This sense of neutral familiarity was often truncated, however by a stinging terror that she might be trapped. And while, in its outlandish, disbelievable first flush, the thought was too intolerable for her not to set to work massaging it into a quasi-religious (and, so far, entirely temporary) mood of resignation, all of this was still less horrifying than the feeling of unreality, of a mysterious but threatening wrongness, which she felt at times like this.

Brian had gone off down the corridor. Patricia wandered through the living room and out onto the veranda and slumped there into a slatted-wood chair, fanning herself ineffectually with her hands against the great heat. When he returned (clutching a batch of manila folders) she barely looked up at him.

"Well!" he said brightly, as though the monosyllable were the vocal equivalent of clicking his heels. "I'm off. Hope the power comes back soon." And he gave her in turn a sudden, quite impersonal grin.

The card that slipped from between his folders as he left, lay on the floor in the corridor for the better part of an hour before, bestirring herself to go in and have a cold shower, Patricia noticed it. It depicted a 'flapper' type from the Roaring 20s, a slim-wristed, headtie'd girl, looking tenderly down at a peeled banana which she held at chest height fastidiously between middle finger and thumb. Inside, a confident, rounded, upright hand had written, 'Happy Birthday, Big Man', and signed itself simply 'K'. The card was dated two years ago. Patricia stared at it for a long time.

"So," she said conversationally to Brian that night. "Who's K?"

The children had been put to bed, the television quenched, and Brian was morosely sorting through some papers at the dining table, while Patricia sat with legs fiercely crossed in the big easy chair, trying in vain to concentrate on 16 Down ('Italian novel with a French point of view'; two words, 3, 6, the first word was probably 'The', the third letter of the second word was 'y'). This was the long silence she broke into when she asked abruptly: "So. Who's 'K'?"

The question startled Brian. He looked up in genuine incomprehension. "Who?"

By way of reply Patricia rose, walked across to where he was sitting, and wordlessly tossed the bright, banana-cherishing 'twenties child onto the table in front of him. 'Happy Birthday, Big Man.' The force of her fury all but swept her on and out of the room; but she swerved, returned to her chair, picked up the paper, and stared unseeingly at 14 Across ('Extravagant': 6 letters, the first letter was 'L').

Brian stood up with a jerk. "What is wrong with you these days?" he demanded. Then, while she stared at him with a look that was past exhaustion as it was past disgust, a look that was chiefly remarkable by the absence from it of -- anything -- his voice rose.

"You know what I'm doing here?" he said desperately, gesticulating at the papers on the table. "I'm trying to make sure the insurance instalments are up to date, before a hurricane comes and takes this roof off from over our heads! Because sure as hell we getting a hurricane this year. Even up here you must be feeling the heat. Sure as hell! And that's all you have to say: 'Who is Kay?' Hear nuh man! I envy you sometimes, yes, woman."

"A hurricane," Patricia said, in a dead voice.

Then, rising, the emotion filling in, she went on: "Well, if that's it, let it come. That's a good one. A hurricane, eh? Well, let it come. I waiting for it."

She tossed the paper onto the chair (it slid at once dejectedly to the floor) and stalked out of the room.

(Concluded next Sunday)

Circular No 38

Newsletter for past alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas, 3 of August 2002. Circular No.38
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
A few lines from Robert Lee on his memories and his actual work for the young.
----------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Cheche,

Welcome to the Old boys network. I am pleased to hear that you have accomplished a great deal in life as a lawyer and that you have a wonderful family including grand children. I do remember you, sort of curly sandy colour blond hair well built guy. Probably grey at this time.

Laugh laugh..

You were a senior at the time. I believe the intent of this website is to put former colleagues in touch with each other, some reminiscing and if a business opportunity arises it's a bonus.

What ever happened with Leoni? His father was the president of Venezuela. I had the most memorable birthday, 30/01/53, which is the same day as Leoni´s. I would quietly enjoy this day as the attention went to him, I avoided the infamous Mount tradition on your birthday "sampat". The 747 that would bring the chefs and food from Venezuela! Then there was Cantores whose father would circle the Mount with his plane before landing at Piarco

 airport.

On a personal note, I am the international manager of a Factoring company in Toronto, Canada. I am blessed with having a career that has allowed me to travel to some of the most exciting countries around the world.

I recently accepted a nomination to the education committee of Factors Chain International, www.factors-chain.com,  160 banks and financial companies in 59 countries. Our first task was to write a manual on running a factoring company in the early stages. We are also charged with the duty of, course material, setting the questions for a correspondence course. We are trying to bring Factoring to Venezuela, I believe that the banking infrastructure is not ready. There is some interest in Venezuela.

Anyways, the real passion of my life is baseball. I am involved with amateur baseball and it consumes 5 days a week of life.

www.eteamz.com/phoenixelite16u,  I take my hat off to you for your commitment to running. New York marathon 2X incredible!

If I get a chance to take some time off later this year I might just head down to Puerto Piritu. My in-laws own a condo in Puerto Piritu.

Robert Lee

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the first few circulars, I am reconstructing them. You would not believe it, I am missing circular No.13 from the set, it was overwritten when I tried to place them in order. So please any one out there who has circular No. 13 please send me a copy!!!!.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Continuing the Who is Where, thanks to Roger Henderson:

27. Richard and Stephen Webster are in Trinidad.

------------------------------------------------------------------

To my friends in TT, specially those that have answered my last two circulars where I mentioned my upcoming visit to TT. Thank you for your support and hope to see you soon.

The date has been set, Wednesday 14 of August I arrive at Pier No.1, with my daughter Viki, 13 years old, after a boat trip from Guiria. I shall be staying at a friends home, Mr. Carl Vaughan. There my telephone number there would be 637.4487.

I hope to be able to meet some of my classmates and you, those that have kept up with my effort to muster the alumni. Please leave a message at Carl Vaughan, so I may call you back.

God Bless

Ladislao

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Listado: C38.xls

Photo: John 03 Gioannetti

8 Queen´s Park Savannah

Column: 020714 wvb Hanging from the family tree

-----------------------------------------------------------------

ATTACHMENTS:

Hanging from the family tree

Sunday, July 14, 2002

TO begin with, an erratum. In last week's column, 'Following the Money', I thought I had written - and my computer confirmed I had - the phrase 'shot its bolt', which phrase appeared in print, however, as 'shut its bolt': clearly the doing of a too-assiduous proofreader, 'correcting' where no error was.

It reminded me: in my very first months as a trainee journalist in Trinidad, back when the world was young, what I thought was a clever application of a phrase from Shakespeare's MacBeth, 'in one fell swoop' - the speaker is MacDuff, the phrase likens MacBeth's killing of MacDuff's children to a hawk crashing down from the sky upon its prey, but in MacBeth's case somehow managing to kill all of MacDuff's children 'in one fell swoop' ('fell' deriving from the Latin word for felon, and meaning villainous or deadly in Elizabethan English) - was trenchantly 'corrected' to 'in one full swoop'.

Similarly, the expression 'shot its bolt' (which, I have since discovered, isn't generally familiar to Jamaicans, though in moderately widespread use elsewhere in the English-speaking world) refers to the short thick arrow, or bolt, shot from a medieval crossbow, and it's meaning is fairly rendered today by the related expression, 'has already taken his/her/its best shot'. The sentence in my column, therefore, should have read: '...all the available evidence suggests that Al-Qaeda has shot its bolt for the time being.' 'Shut its bolt', by contrast, suggests 'closing up shop': something quite different.

While on the subject of last Sunday's column, I'm glad to see that my concluding recommendation was promptly acted upon. My paragraph read: 'The loud threats emanating from Washington last week that US forces will be withdrawn from their 'peacekeeping' roles around the world unless exempted from the jurisdiction of the newly-established International Criminal Court are the threats of a bully and a coward, and the international community should call Washington's bluff.' Last Thursday, a story by Associated Press writer Edith Lederer headlined 'US Backs Down From Immunity Demand' read in part:

'The United States on Wednesday backed off from its demand for permanent immunity for US peacekeepers from the new war crimes tribunal, proposing instead a ban on any investigation of its peacekeepers for a year. In the face of intense criticism from countries around the world, including close allies, US Ambassador John Negroponte circulated the new proposal to the UN Security Council...

'At the open council meeting, ambassadors from nearly 40 countries criticised the US demand for immunity, saying it would affect peacekeeping and stability from the Balkans to Africa...Canada's UN Ambassador Paul Heinbecker warned that the United States was putting the credibility of the Security Council, the legality of international treaties, and the principle that all people are equal and accountable before the law at stake.'

And so, dearly beloved, to our theme for this Sunday, provoked by the following news item from AP:

'In what may be the most startling fossil find in decades, scientists in central Africa say they have unearthed the oldest trace of a pre-human ancestor: a remarkably intact skull of an apelike species that walked upright as far back as seven million years ago. The thick-browed, flat-faced skull was found in Chad, 1,500 miles west of pre-human discoveries in east Africa.'

Now, it goes without saying - or it should - that this column is no Christian fundamentalist platform doggedly pushing an infantile Creationism. Even if it isn't the whole truth, Darwinian evolution is manifestly a large part of the truth of how we - and all life - got where we and it are today; and my own reservations about it stop well short of disowning that fact. In the main, however, those reservations are:

1. *There are species, eg, a kind of beetle, that had to go through several maladaptive mutations before the sum of those mutations proved selective. What are the odds of that happening in a 'survival of the fittest' world, I ask myself.

2. *In the evolution of some species there appears to be a drive towards aesthetic expression which occurs despite being maladaptive. It's hard to explain the extraordinary and subtle visual glory of a peacock's fan as simply a sexual display (if that's all it is, the peahen must be the world's greatest art critic!). And a certain moth, eg, first reproduced two big round 'eyes' on its wings - which was fine, in that by suggesting eternal vigilance it may be presumed to have discouraged predators; except that it then went further and spoiled the effect by replicating them: adorning itself, for symmetry's sake, with four 'eyes', which rather ruined the camouflage. What principle was at play there?

3. It sometimes seems that there's a considerable mimetic or copycat 'instinct' at work in evolution. And while this can generally be explained by the selective value of camouflage, in particular instances it seems insufficient. The moth that replicates on each wing a waterdrop so realistic that the line that crosses it is 'refracted', exactly as it would be if it were a stick in water, smacks of an inutile but finical perfectionism.

4. The generally accepted graph of human evolution - barely inclining upward for five million years (actually, since last week, seven million), and then, since the Pleistocene, shooting straight up to arrive at, ta-dah! you and me, in our sudden, lonely and hubristic splendour - that graph seems to seriously under-imagine just how long seven million years are, and how many times the human story could have been told and retold, and retold and retold, in that time. In particular, we who, uniquely in primates, replaced bodily hair with subcutaneous fat; who, again uniquely, developed nose bridges (to keep water from forcing itself down our nostrils while swimming) and, in the female, long hair (for the young to hold on to in the water); whose females, again uniquely, developed breasts and fatty hips (for extra insulation of, respectively, their milk and foetuses in the cold medium of water); who retain vestigial webs between our fingers; whose newborn can swim instinctively (though they soon lose the ability); who have a primordial terror of sharks, rivalling our terror of snakes (or, in the case of Jamaican women, lizards); whose hair on our back is hydrodynamically shaped; and who, above all else, still exhibit an inconsolable need to 'go to the beach', even if, as in temperate countries, all we do there is sit in our cars and stare nostalgically at the sea - where, in the palaeontologists' graph of the ascent of man, is our epoch as seashore-dwelling, quasi-aquatic mammals?

5. Finally - and this may well be dismissed as mystical mumbo-jumbo - there seems to be an exuberance in nature, an espousing of riotous colours and intricate forms for their own sake, which leads to the sensation that life is good, and not merely a dour and violent struggle for survival.

And now I see that, with that last observation, I have described the Jamaican paradox. The reality, which is that life in Jamaica in our time is generally nasty and brutish - even when not short - is perfectly counterpoised by an irrational belief that life is good; and that belief, far from being a mere nationalistic lash, is expressed from the very centre of your Jamaican.

Just yesterday I passed a young woman walking on the pavement of Barbican Square. She was from that socioeconomic class where she must have known deprivation of one kind or another since birth, and the odds are she will also have seen violent death close up and personal at least once while still a child. Her present situation cannot be easy, and her prospects (weighed down herself in a few years time by several children and different baby-fathers) must be considerably worse.

And yet, in her expression, in the way she held her head, and in the trenchant exuberance of her stride (what in Trinidad would be referred to as 'flingin' de ting!') I saw, writ large, the bone-deep philosophical conclusion that life was good. Like the coat of the ocelot, declaring through its pure resplendence that life is good, is a festive thing, a carnival - no matter how the creature itself stalks and rends its prey, and snarls inconsolably at the moon.