TRINIDADIANS, NEPALESE, BOLIVIANS – anybody in the world – who thinks Brexit isn’t hugely relevant to them is making the mistake of the man weed-whacking, without a face-mask, a patch of grass where people walk their dogs; he’ll be swallowing faecal matter before the job gets done.

The world is more immediately connected today than when World War I ended 101 years ago (11 November 1918). If a relatively minor trigger like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand precipitated four years of war and 40 million deaths, it is impossible to predict the knock-on effects of the biggest economic upheaval of the last five centuries.

TRINIDAD and Tobago watched in amazement last week as the police Special Operations Response Team, led by the inimitable Double-G, aka Commissioner of Police Gary Griffith, swept down, in a rapid, ultraprecise military operation that a crack British SAS (Special Air Services) commando unit might have envied, on what the police said was a human trafficking scheme masquerading as a drug rehabilitation centre.

The mastermind of the alleged people-smuggling ring – a Pentecostal pastor (the lowest occupational bar anyone at all can jump into a free-flowing cash business) – painstakingly explained he wasn’t trafficking any healthy people at all, but merely keeping mentally ill or substance-addicted ones locked up safely, on behalf of their families, who paid for the service; if it were kidnapping, the pastor might have argued, the ransoms were being collected in monthly instalments by standing order at the bank. The pastor admitted that he was himself an ex-convict, having spent unspecified time “inside” for equally unspecified violence, but pointed out that Nelson Mandela (who was, impliedly, very much like the pastor) had also been locked up by the (equally impliedly illegitimate & shameless) apartheid South African government.

MARTIN SCORSESE, the great American filmmaker, a friend told me, dismissed the new Todd Phillip/Joaquin Phoenix film, Joker, as “not cinema”. “That,” I thought, “is a sure sign that senility has set in.”

There’s hope for Scorsese’s mind, though, because he didn’t actually say that; my friend applied, too liberally, Scorsese’s dismissal of Marvel movies generally as visual “theme parks”. “It isn’t the cinema,” Scorsese said, “of human beings trying to convey emotional psychological experiences to another human being.” It may mean nothing at all to people who peremptorily dismiss all comics equally, but there’s a world of difference between Marvel and DC (Detective Comics).

MY FAVOURITE MUSICIAN of all time remains Jimi Hendrix, the man who exploded the electric guitar and my teenaged consciousness without drugs of any kind (at least for me). My favourite musician in my teenaged years was Alice Cooper, who backed up his shock-rock Marilyn Manson-before-Marilyn Manson persona with excellent lyrics and some good – sometimes some great – rock music.

Turns out they both had Trinidad connections.