THE OLDER I get – and the shallower Carnival gets – the more I think the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival week is the year’s unequivocal best seven-day period. The festival’s terrific opening film, Damian Marcano’s Cheese, screens for the last time at the NALIS amphitheatre at 7pm on Friday. Admission is free if you register online. Here are my recommendations for the rest of the festival, six fleeting days to see films made by and for people just like you.

IT’S PROBABLY NOT an exaggeration to say I speak for millions when I say I’m Queened right out! Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, as the Beatles sang, and I am saddened by the death of anyone’s mother – but when American television networks screen near 24 hours a day of mainly old folks in usually old buildings in always dark clothing speaking in monotones, it makes me yearn for the pre-therapy radio shock jock version of Howard Stern; at least with the old Howard there was always the potential for lesbians.

EVEN FOR very fortunate people like me, who’d happily pay to do their jobs, the weight of the world can be too much. On most days like those, a good movie, book or great piece of music and/or tail will lift the spirits. Some days, though, not even chocolate, the best thing you can have with your clothes on, will work.

THEORETICALLY, I LOVE all mankind; in practice, I can tolerate very few individuals. I accept John Donne’s dictum that every man’s death diminishes me and send not to know for whom the bells toll but most people’s deaths don’t bring me down and some actually perk me up; on hearing someone I disliked has died, I usually say, solemnly, from the heart, “Good!”