Whether in Bridgetown or New York, we all just do the best we can in bad times, don’t we?  Here, a woman buys a case of water in preparation for a large winter storm in NYC January 26.  Photo Copyright © 2015 by Andrew Kelly/EPA.

“We didn't start the fire.  It was always burning, since the world’s been turning.”  Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”

She’s not George Lamming, either, but Aprille Thomas won the Kamau Brathwaite Award for her poetry at NIFCA 2014.

Two of my most pleasant discoveries during the 2012 National Independence Festival of Creative Arts (NIFCA) were Mark Ramsay and Aprille Thomas.  I heard them both read for the first time at the Goddard Enterprises NIFCA Literary Arts Gala held that year.

Barbadian writer Timothy Callender (1946-1989) knew something about bad men.  Photo from timothycallender.com, Copyright 2014.

Good help is hard to find in Barbados, said the Jamaican service station supervisor.  So, too, apparently, is good sense.

A friend and colleague of mine, the late, great animation critic, historian and independent scholar Emru Townsend, once said, “Common sense is usually neither.”  He was right, God rest him.  He preferred to talk about good sense.

Barbados protests.  Image based on caribbean360.com photo, Copyright 2014.

“We are getting back in tune with our revolutionary tradition…our tradition of activism.”  David Comissiong, commenting July 22, 2014, on Barbadians’ current protests against the new municipal solid waste tax