Newsletter for
alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas, 28 of October 2017 No. 834
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friends,
Sad news, the more
so for the Circular. One of our chief
writers has gone to better pastures.
His was a silent
suffering, since it took me by surprise.
--------------------------------------------------------
Jon Golding <jon@financialist.com>
19 Oct
Announcement of Death - Jon Golding
To
all Jon’s contacts,
With regret, his four children, Alex, Francesca, Victoria and
Michael would like to announce the death of their father Jon Golding, who
passed away last Thursday after losing his battle to cancer.
All are invited to his funeral which will be at 9:15am on
Thursday 26th October at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Cadogan Street,
Chelsea, SW3. This will be followed by a burial attended by family and close
friends at Brompton Cemetery.
The family invite you to attend the wake to celebrate Jon’s life,
which will be held at the Admiral Codrington, 17 Mossop St, Chelsea, London SW3 2LY from 12pm.
We are asking that donations should be made in lieu of floral
tributes to The Royal Marsden, Chelsea who helped our dad tremendously over the
years during his battle with cancer.
Please pass this message through your networks to anyone who knew
Jon.
This email address will no longer be active however if you wish
to contact the family you can do so on contactgolding@gmail.com
Kind
Regards
Alex,
Francesca, Victoria and Michael Golding
----------------------------------------------------------------------.
Making peace with VS Naipaul
Wayne
Brown
Sunday, October 21, 2001
"...when
[Naipaul] decided to leave Trinidad, separation gave him a great theme: the
condition of being an expatriate, a stranger to places, a wanderer, an
outsider, undiluted by local loyalties, always looking in. And yet nothing
disgusts him more than to be called a Caribbean writer. "Nothing was made
in Trinidad," he said; but in a deeper sense, a number of his own books
were... In retrospect, he despised Trinidad so much that he couldn't bring
himself to mention it in his thank-you remarks on learning he'd won the
Nobel."
(Robert
Hughes, Time magazine, October 22nd.)
"To
be converted [to Islam] you have to destroy your past, destroy your history.
You have to stamp on it, you have to say, 'My ancestral culture does not exist,
it doesn't matter'."
(VS
Naipaul at a reading in London, the week before he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature, explaining what he called the "calamitous effect" of
Islam.)
**************
On
Friday last, the lead story of the Internet [Trinidad] Express was adorned with
a photograph of two local firemen, resplendent in bright yellow man-on-the-moon
helmets and "space suits". The caption read: "Fire officers are
all geared up to protect themselves from possible anthrax exposure in
responding to a call from Royal Pharmacy, Prince Street, Port of Spain. The
pharmacy yesterday received a 'suspicious package' from Australia."
The pharmacy's proprietor, it should be said at once, revealed he
thought the package suspicious because "we never get mail from
Australia"(!)
This aside, the story read in part: "The Trinidad and Tobago
Fire Services responded to more than 10 reports of fears of anthrax
yesterday... all... proved to be without substance. Fire tenders screamed
through the streets..."
Then, zeroing in on the pharmacy case, the paper described how
"Two specialists, Mario Collin and Rohan Singh" -- and let the reader
note the political correctness of the Trinidad Fire Services: one Indian, one
Creole -- "boarded the specially equipped Hazmat truck at 2:07 pm. By
2.15, after snaking through Port of Spain traffic, the officers arrived just
outside the pharmacy, which had been closed following the discovery. The
excitement (sic!) heightened as the specialists donned their yellow protective
suits, equipped with gas masks, an air supply, special gloves and boots. They
entered the pharmacy, took the package and placed it in a special container
which was then covered. They emerged, placed the container into the rear of the
Hazmat truck and walked along Prince Street to the East Dry River (EDR). On a
grassy area next to the EDR the men were then hosed down using detergents
contained in the Hazmat truck which quietly followed behind..."
"The excitement."
I
read that story with high amusement and thought: "I've been out of
Trinidad too long." How else could I not have realised, at once, that
there was no way Trinidad would be able to resist claiming the US anthrax drama
as its own -- no way it would be able to refrain from making mas with it, both
earnestly -- or at least in unconscious parody -- as it was doing now, and
again as real mas' (sic!) come Carnival 2002, all of world history repeating
itself, in Trinidad, twice, first as tragicomedy, and then as farce?
(And
you can be sure that, between now and then, Trinidadians will get a third bite
of that apple, and that even if, to their profound -- if unacknowledged --
bereavement, they're not gifted with a single authentic anthrax case, the next
flu virus to strike that two-island nation will be dubbed "The
Antrax" (as in: "But how you looking so poorly today?"
"Boy, The Antrax lick mih dong!"), Trinidadians being the only people
in the world to affectionately give nicknames to their flu epidemics -- and so
to personalise, internalise, and in a sense be stricken by, the great
destructive personalities and events taking place around them. I myself, e.g.,
having lived in Trinidad for most of the years between the mid-70s and the
mid-90s, can remember having suffered from The Ayatollah, The Chernobyl, The
Abu Bakr and The Saddam).
To understand that is to understand the heart of
Trinidadian-ness, which is the Trinidadian's promiscuous, self-dramatising, and
earnest reduction to absurdity of everything taking place in the world around
him. Trinidad is less a country than a way of engaging and abolishing the real
world; and carnival is its true expression.
With that in mind, cf Naipaul's attack on Islam quoted at the top
of this column.
"To be converted [to Islam] you have to destroy your past,
destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say, 'My ancestral
culture does not exist, it doesn't matter'."
Now, a certain kind of Naipaul detractor, having read books like
The Middle Passage and An Area of Darkness, will protest that that is exactly
what Naipaul has spent most his writer's career doing: claiming that his
ancestral culture -- whether by that one means the culture of India or that of
Trinidad -- "doesn't matter". But for such an acute and dry-eyed
observer (the Nobel committee rightly praised his "incorruptible
scrutiny") Naipaul has seldom been wise. To the contrary,
self-contradiction has long been the ice on which his prose sails so flawlessly
(which makes him a better artist than a philosopher); and that kind of putdown
interests me less than the quintessentially Naipaullean sentence, "You
have to stamp on it".
The point is, the latter is also a quintessentially Trinidadian
sentence. No other English-speaking people, I would venture to affirm, whether
from the Caribbean, the West, the African subcontinent or the East (Australia,
New Zealand), would think to speak that sentence -- not in the context in which
Naipaul speaks it. For Naipaul in his denunciation of Islam is being dead
serious (and brave: cf the fatwa issued on the head of Salman Rushdie); and yet
it is, of course, a cartoon image. One is invited to imagine a Garfield or a
Calvin (from "Calvin & Hobbes") or a Lucy (from
"Peanuts") stamping on....
Well, stamping on what, precisely?
...Stamping on "his ancestral culture".
???
The very image achieves the reflexive Trinidadian twist and lash,
the work of reductio ad absurdum. Moreover, it is a pleasant reminder
that, fully 45 years on, the essentially comic sensibility of the author of
these lines (from Miguel Street) hasn't really changed:
"Laura used to shout, 'Alwyn, you broad mouth brute, come
here'. And, 'Gavin, if you don't come this minute, I make you fart fire, you
hear.' And, 'Lorna, you black bowleg bitch, why you can't look at what you
doing?'
"The oddest part of this whole business was that Laura was
no beauty. As Boyee said one day, 'She have a face like the top of a motor car
battery'."
So this columnist is one Trinidadian who isn't overly exercised
that Naipaul clearly made a point of omitting any mention of Trinidad in his
first response to the Nobel news.
My younger daughter Saffrey was in her mid-teens when, in
response to my (not-entirely-serious) complaint, she explained patiently,
"We're your daughters, Daddy. We don't have to read what you write."
I understood at once what she meant. And though I would have had
trouble explaining it -- or explaining this -- hey, listen. In the same way,
and for the same reason, Naipaul doesn't have to acknowledge Trinidad.
-----------------------------------------------.
11-09-2017 14:57:24:
Mt Berment Joseph: Happy
Birthday, Toddy!
11-09-2017 15:02:22:
Mt Ramsahai toddy: Thanks Joe
11-09-2017 15:03:32:
M Rampersandsingh Anand: 🎂🍾 HAPPY BIRTHDAY 👍
11-09-2017 15:03:38:
Ladislao: Same here
Toddy Oldboys in Bogotá
11-09-2017 16:05:26:
M Zanelli Enrique: Names? I
recognize Ladislao but who are the others? Vintage? Happy bday Toddy
11-09-2017 16:22:15:
Mt Ramsahai toddy: Hey thanks
old boys
11-09-2017 17:12:36:
Ladislao: Names: Ladislao
Kertész, Anthony Obrien, Luis Guio, George Iwaszkiewicz. Photo taken
Yesterday 10 sept 2017
11-09-2017 17:45:16:
M Zanelli Enrique: Is George
Iwaszkiewicz AKA Nazi?
11-09-2017 17:49:51:
Mm Charles Neil: Is that
Luis ghio from Valencia?
11-09-2017 17:51:43:
Ladislao: There were
two Georges, the other is mickiewicz. Same time. 1959
11-09-2017 18:17:42:
Joseph Habib: Quick
question, this Luis Guio, did he have to sons that also went to the Mount? I
knew 2 Guios that were there in the 70s. They names were Carlos, being the
elder and Luis. They were from Columbia. Happy birthday Toddy. Hope things are
in your favour.
11-09-2017 18:19:44:
M Rampersandsingh Anand: Carlos
live in Mississauga Canada
11-09-2017 18:25:09:
Joseph Habib: You mean
he lives there now. I was wondering, the guy in the photo, is he related to the
70s Guios?
11-09-2017 20:25:24:
Ladislao: Luis guio
lives here in bogota
11-09-2017 20:35:28:
Mm Charles Neil: The Ghio
in the 70's lived in Valencia, his mother is the person that organised the trip
for the aqualads in 1972. They had horses and some of us went horse riding on
their farm. I went back in 1974 and stayed at Gustavo Tar home and also spent a
week in Caracas at The Holmes brothers. Jimmy Samaroo was also spending time at
the Ghio's home in VALENCIA.
11-09-2017 20:38:26:
M Coscarart Salvador: There is
also another Carlos Guio in Canada
11-09-2017 20:38:57:
Joseph Habib: Thanks for
clearing that up. The Guios that I'm speaking about, went Mount from 1975 -
1979. They would be in they mid 50s by now.
11-09-2017 20:39:48:
M Coscarart Salvador: Yes The
guio Neil is talking about went to mount
11-09-2017 20:40:12:
Mm Charles Neil: Yes, I
know know Joe. Ghio is the way their name was spelled
11-09-2017 20:42:04:
Joseph Habib: Ok. Thanks
11-09-2017 20:42:55:
M Coscarart Salvador: Yes
11-09-2017 20:43:14:
Mm Charles Neil: I know the
Ghio's that was in your time Joe. I had already left mount We
had an old boys association from 1975=77 and went there on Saturdays .we had
full use of all the facilities. Thanks to Cutty. We also played volleyball with
the flight attendants from BWIA. Johnny Garcia, Poggy, Jimmy, Pig and myself
were the ones that had the first old boys association
11-09-2017 20:56:24:
Joseph Habib: Bring back
those old time days. Let's have reunion before the world comes to an end. Lol
11-09-2017 20:58:05:
Mm Charles Neil: Joe, I
tried so fucking hard, I am just fed up And I know some other of the old boys
did also But we have so many old boys that have pussies instead of a dick as
they get older. We still have Fr Augustine and Bro Rupert, let's not forget
them They played a big role in my time The fucking Canadian guys can kiss my
ass. They are all full of shit. Must be the cold that freeze their fucking
brain. And when I say Canadian, I meant the ones in my time that migrated there.
11-09-2017 21:09:52:
M Rampersandsingh Anand: Like Who
11-09-2017 21:11:42:
Mm Charles Neil: Anand, u
probably just know them by name, no big deal. They are not worth remembering
11-09-2017 21:12:32:
Joseph Habib: Oh!!! I
see. I will talk to some of the guys that live in Trinidad. Hear what they have
to say or suggest. There's no more Fr. Cuthbert and was the one keeping us
together. Now that he's gone, we have only ourselves. I will be in touch.
11-09-2017 21:12:49:
Mm Charles Neil: Anyway.
Time for my cocktails. Will chat tomorrow Joe Berment called me from New York
to see how I was doing, my brother was worried about me because of Irma.
11-09-2017 21:16:26:
Mm Charles Neil: Salvador
is also a godsend. His heart is bigger than most of us I remember when I
went to visit all the priests at the mount after not seeing me for over 7
years in 1985, I first saw Fr Odo, he was not too excited, then told me
Cuthbert was at the yogurt facilities, I went there and he was filling the
yogurt bottles. He did not recognize me, but when I told him who I was, he put
down everything and gave me a big hug. I then saw Fr Benedict, he held my hand
right and said....let me pray and bless you. I then went to visit “Bro” Fr.
Vincent who was principal at the time, he knew who I was right away. I spent
about 2 hours with him, talking about my time after leaving the mount, we
walked the whole school grounds, and then went down to the church area.
11-09-2017 21:59:51:
Mm Charles Neil: Bernard
Lange and Bro Rupert was down at the pool. I stopped there and they were also
happy to see me. The pool pump was giving trouble and I offered to donate one,
but they said they had it covered.
------------------------------------------
EDITED by Ladislao
Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to be in the
circular’s mailing list or any old boy that you would like to include.
-------------------------------------------
Photos:
06WK0671REUNION2006, Fr. Cuthbert and group
12LK3827FBGMOAMO, Gonzalo Montiel and Alfredo Montiel
15JG0001JGOGRADUATION, Jon Golding Graduation
08UN1595REUNION2008, Reunion group
