TRINIDAD’S MINSH, Peter Minshall, the original masman, christened President Barack Obama “an angel” in his first term and, while Minsh has never got a Carnival King at all wrong, he clearly didn’t get President Obama completely right: you do not gain the White House without being at least a devil of a dealmaker.

ANY Trinidadian could have warned Meghan Markle that, though she was a drop-dead gorgeous beauty who could have married into even the most bigoted white Bajan clan, it was only a matter of time, after she married into the British Royal Family that she would be reduced, by the type of Englishman who voted Brexit, to an “uppity n-word”.

YOU DON’T know whether to tap Fat Nixon in the head for possibly starting World War III (and certainly ramping up Islamist terrorist attacks globally) by ordering the killing of that Iranian mofo or to send him a thank you note for doing something no Trini government could do in nearly 60 years of Independence: making Trinidad & Tobago the eighth-safest place in the world to live, ahead of even Barbados (which comes in right behind, at number nine).

TO WRITE a startlingly original newspaper column, you’ve got to copy ideas wholesale and, in 1999, I stole a great one from the Miami Herald’s Robert Steinback who, every January, wrote a column making predictions for the coming year and assessing the accuracy of his predictions the year before.