My wife bought me these excellent memory-improvement tablets; of course I keep forgetting to take them, indeed, have actually taken to throwing them away (making up in deviousness whatever I’m losing in recollection) so she won’t notice that the level of pills is not being depleted. One way or the other, though, the bottle and the game will soon be up; but I do have what I think would be a foolproof excuse: I forgot.

By a tangentially linked process—I wouldn’t say I remembered them—the memory pills got me thinking about those prescription drug TV ads in the most expensive primetime advertising slots.

TWO SATURDAYS ago, I had a tumour removed from my oesophagus. I got out of the Intensive Care Unit (so-called because that is exactly what you might need at short notice) on Monday evening and out of hospital itself one Friday ago.

Part II of Under the Knife of Damocles

LAST SATURDAY I underwent surgery to remove a tumour from the end of my gullet… but even though you’re reading this column now, I wrote it before I went under the knife. So neither you nor I have any idea how the operation went. Hopefully it wasn’t one of those procedures doctors describe with the words, “The operation was a 100 per cent success. Regrettably, the patient didn’t survive.”

And then I’ll be in the ICU for a couple of days (just in case they need the machines kept there) and in hospital for five to seven.

TOMORROW, Saturday December 10, I undergo surgery to remove the tumour from my oesophagus and thank goodness in general and FIFA badness in particular for this year’s World Cup, which should never have been awarded to a human rights disaster area like Qatar – but which, for football lovers, has been even better than the Russian World Cup (that other disastrous, dictator-pleasing, human rights-degrading FIFA award).

TRINIDAD IS one big flood basin now. Even the mountains aren’t safe from the wettest rainy season anyone can remember, with retaining walls crumbling like wet Crix and spilling mud and flood into the upper levels of the fancy new Cocorite plannings. Whole houses are slipping down hillsides and the wonder is that it isn’t whole villages.

On Tuesday, the Caroni River burst its banks and flooded the southbound lanes of the Buzz, the Uriah Butler Highway, making it instantly impassable. Within minutes, not hours, of that, traffic snarled as far west as Cocorite and as far east as Piarco Airport.