Walking in the park and reminiscing

Well maybe not. If you read this blog you'd have realised that I've been on a personal journey for the last year and what a ride it's been. The question came up whether or not this blog should go on...there are so many things I want to write about but, in the course of changing my life, it's getting more and more difficult to carve out the space to write here too. Most days the last thing I want to do is boot up the computer and write after a long day at the office.

Until yesterday when the Bookman and Adele reminded me once again why we blog. Thanks guys. In the coming weeks I hope to share some of the work that I'm doing towards a larger piece, Notes from Paradise, that I'm working on. You've already seen some of it, the bits on the market, Woodford Square, thumbnail studies really. Here's one:

"Do you know that the Beatles came to Trinidad? No, really, they did, somewhere in the early sixties and there are pictures to prove it. It’s one of those really well-kept open secrets of this little island. Noel Norton took the pictures of the Fab Four on some or other beach with then Prime Minister, Dr. Eric Williams and his young daughter, Erica. It is impossible to imagine that they, the most successful, recognized group of the time managed to slip in and out of the country with nary a person noticing. But it did happen, yes, I’ve seen the pictures and they are real.

The pictures were commissioned by the Tourism Development Authority of the day and the prints are probably now moldering away somewhere if they haven’t already been thrown out. They were part of a repository of hundreds of images relating to this country’s heritage. Sadly many of the photographers are now either deceased or so old that they’ve been relegated to the retirement pile but these people managed to document some of the most wonderful things about Trinidad and Tobago. It is mind boggling that they are all hidden away somewhere and not on display.

It was almost an accident, that they came across my desk in a stack of material that I was cataloguing. At first there was some mild skepticism and then another look. Sure enough it was them, Mr. Norton confirmed it a year or so later when interviewed for a piece that I was writing. "