WHEN WE were small children, my father’s job took him outside of Trinidad very often. One year, he was at home for only two weekends, those of his annual vacation. Consequently, my mother took us to the movies.

MY TREATMENT for the tumour in my gullet, which was diagnosed last September 19, ended on May 3, after four bouts of chemotherapy from last September to November, surgery to remove the tumour on 10 December and four post-surgery chemo blasts starting in March.

PLAIN TALK is bad manners as every Trini knows so I declare, rudely, but right up front, that the headline above should probably be, “Denis (and a little bit about Denyse).”

EVEN BEFORE I heard their smoking cover of Neil Diamond’s Red Red Wine in 1978, a version even better than the Jamaican ones I knew (because of the chant in the middle eight), even before they began selling 70m records and staying on the British pop music charts for a record four years-plus, even before I found out the original Birmingham-based lineup had English, Welsh, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish and Yemeni parentage – they were diverse 40 years before it became a thing – even before I bought their first CD, I liked UB40, purely because of their name.

MY WIFE never understood why I never missed The Apprentice in the mid-2000s until I explained that, once a week, I genuinely felt superior to a billionaire. He was so poor a businessman, so dreadful a judge of anything of quality, so helpless a boss.

He probably wasn’t a billionaire back then, just the compulsive, self-aggrandising liar he still is, but, when he revealed his idiocy and deep moral flaws every week, I felt pretty good about myself. The shameless way he used his adult children as props for his vanity, eg, reflected my attempt to raise my then small children, not crush them under my own desperate need for validation.