WE WERE AT a Future Centre gathering. It was the first time I had talked to Oliver Headley since we were at school together; the last time I would see him alive. Editor Harold Hoyte sauntered over and remarked: “You know, Richard, you do a much better job when you don’t take yourself seriously and try to write intelligent stuff.”
Words to that effect. At least, as I understood him. Great, I thought. My mandate is to write foolishness, liberally interspersed with vulgarity. The latter content would ensure that no teacher ever set a class to read my column. My readers would be intellectually backward, gutter-humour perverts, impossible to lead astray.
And so it continued for almost 27 years. Until the first bomb exploded week before last. I mean, what is your “worst nightmare”? Something serious, right? Like falling asleep while supposedly watching a toddler. Or a family accident, house fire . . . or waking to find you’re married to Hillary Clinton.
Well, reader Joy Springer emailed me recently: “YOU are my worst nightmare!” Me? Maggie Hoad’s last boy? I is a nightmare? I should’ve heeded Harold.
Worse was to come. I first saw Adrian Green on TV. My first reaction: “This man mad as . . .!” Then I saw him at Frank Collymore and realised his brilliance. Read his columns and figured: here at last is a thinking, analytical human being. Just what our country needs.
Advice for Adrian
Lo and behold, last Sunday he knocked me for six. He claimed I “helped shape” his “developing mind”. Fortunately, after that he veered off from reading papers to other things like girls. And when he came back, the scales fell from his eyes. He realised I had feet of clay and transferred his allegiance to Hilary, Trevor, Waldo, Elombe, Olutoye and David Comissiong. Thank God for that! I could never live with the guilt of permanently corrupting a youth.
Two pieces of advice for Adrian: first, I am a loner. Apart from the Latin poet Horace, who extolled the virtues of simple living and “desiring only what is enough”, I can honestly say I was influenced by no one. You have a brain. Use it to chart your own course. There are many untold sides to the Barbados story.
Secondly, you mentioned leaving off reading newspapers for pursuits like girls. In case you haven’t realised, these two activities need not be mutually exclusive. Indeed, if, like me, you are prone to premature exclamations, try counting the “neo-liberals” in a Tennyson Joseph article while in flagrante delicto. This will moderate both your eminence and imminence.
However, Adrian, the future is with your generation. Don’t let old fogies mess it up. First, the republic lie. How many of your new mentors have exposed the nonsense that the alternative to a monarchy with a British Queen must be a republic? Not true. We can just as easily have a monarchy with a Bajan King or Queen, true African tradition. Unless they feel a black Barbadian isn’t worthy of such honour.
Secondly, how many have warned that today’s cleverly crafted consumerism and takeover of our businesses by foreigners are but new versions of slavery and colonialism?
How many have expressed outrage, as I have, that the Europeans and Americans, after centuries of perpetrating every atrocity known to humankind (read about the Diego Garcia eviction), have now set themselves up as the final arbiters as to our moral position on everything?
So that a white man from the EU and a white woman from Britain can dictate to us how we should discipline children, punish murderers; whether we allow our young men to be legally buggered. All the while we’re boasting about “independence”!
I go with Errol Barrow’s vision “that the people of Barbados would be able to run their own affairs, to pay for the cost of running their own country”. It grinds me to hear people saying we must cave in to whatever tourists want. In Havana, before Castro, they could request a nine-year-old boy, an 11-year-old-girl. Do we copy?
True, some have made it to the heights and terraces of society by ranting about historical inhumanities. But show me any of our disillusioned youth whom such rantings have inspired to raise themselves above liming on a block and shooting each other.
That will be your battle, Adrian. I goin’ back to heeding Harold.
Richard Hoad is a farmer and social commentator. Email porkhoad@gmail.com