Picture Courtesy Mark Lyndersay

A little ditty/ ‘bout ANR and Abu/ set out this way cuz / rhyme’s less painful to do

THIRTY-TWO YEARS pass now since the Old Abu uprise/

and, every year, July 27 is still a shock but no surprise/ Babies newborn when Muslimeen first shoot up the place/ watching the mirror now, seeing lines in they face/ A new generation grow up “after de Coup”/ but we ent find someone yet who could tell we what to do/ What law to pass, what guideline to enshrine/ To make sure we never again hear bullets whine

AMBITIOUS YOUNG TRINIDADIANS often threaten to “put Trinidad on the world map” (usually with dreadful soca songs) while their Tobagonian counterparts tend to actually quietly do it on a huge scale (like Dwight Yorke winning the UEFA championship in Fergie time in 1999, or whoever the serial killer is who’s murdered seven elderly white people in their own homes – although, for that infamy to pinpoint Scarborough, the Tobago police would have to solve the case).

IN A WEEK in which the political Fates are serving up a pair of slow, waist-high balls outside off-stump on both sides of the Atlantic, I’m opting not to flash my bat at either, “should in case” I find myself being caught out.

BELLE, our beautiful big tan pothound, who stands almost at my waist height, is on her way out. She’s hardly getting up any more. At age ten, she’s already lived longer than most dogs her size, but now she’s literally on her last legs: the aggressive bone cancer that has reduced her right front leg to a fragile organic crutch will spread. Just to touch the leg even lightly in the wrong way now makes her yelp.

LAST WEEK, the Christian Taliban (disguised as “the US Supreme Court”) overruled Roe v Wade, the most important decision ever given by any court, anywhere, because it started the world debate over the right of women to terminate or carry to term their own firetrucking pregnancies.