OF COURSE, WHEN you’re moving all your stuff down the stairs when you’re moving IN, it almost doesn’t matter. Indeed, if you must wrestle a deep freezer along a narrow staircase into your apartment, down is way better than up. Put in easygoing terms, a basement flat scales the top-floor. Gravity is even helpful, going down. Yes, the penthouse has the view, but, when all you’re looking at is the underside of a mahogany chest-of-drawers you have to manhandle on your own chest-of-bones either up or down stairs, downstairs wins hands-down, every time; and if you’re on a hillside, your “down-the-stairs” flat still has a great view.

All the time you’re in occupation of your “downstairs” apartment, you’re happy. Every fortnight, when you’re coasting down 39 steps carrying two cases of beer, you don’t just sing the praises of having a parking space higher than your apartment, you firetrucking yodel them!

Today’s Number One Film: Paddington, 2.47pm Cinemax BEST FILM OF THE DAY. Watch this if you liked Babe, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or The Adventures of Milo and Otis. There are pure-kiddie movies – such as Finding Nemo, Up and The Incredibles – that are so good, grownups might like them; and there are other “kiddie” films that are really grown up films kids can also enjoy, like the Shrek and Toy Story films. Paddington may be the best of the latter lot so far made, at least for West Indians who have left home: with frequent soundtrack appearances by a live calypso band (featuring lead vocals by Tobago Crusoe)

Every year, five million Catholics from all around the world visit the Vatican, never-see-come-for-Holy See. Two million Muslims make the hadj to Mecca, a pilgrimage required by every one of all of the many versions of Islam. Another million Catholics find their way to Medjugore, to stand on the same spot where, in 1981, six children imagined they saw the ghost of a virgin who, two millennia before, apparently gave birth to God.

Last week, a single individual, made a far less irrational pilgrimage of his own to a place that was far more important, for all humanity, than the combined religious tourism destinations of the world: London-born ecologist and botanist, Professor David Goodall, aged 104, left Australia and went to Switzerland, one of half-a-dozen or so states in the world that allow assisted suicide, where, with the aid of the humanist group, Exit International, he died, happily, a week ago; one hesitates to add, “God bless him”.

Today’s Number One Film: Waltz with Bashir, 9.10pm Cinemax BEST FILM OF THE DAY. Watch this if you liked The Fog of War, American Splendour or Frost-Nixon. Though the animation is eerily beautiful and enough of a reward in itself, its immense power is only realised at the very end, in the last few seconds, when the incredible good sense of making a documentary about war in a cartoon is revealed in an unforgettable sequence, the only non-animated portion of the film. With most of the narration and dialogue being in Hebrew and/or Arabic, and with English subtitles such an unpredictable quantity in Latin American cable/DIRECTV

LAST WEEK, the adult fates of 18,000 children were settled in one morning by the Secondary Entrance Assessment examination. In sympathy with those little ones who will grow up to find that the only way they can put their hands on a BMW or an Audi is to wash it for someone else, I began my own Sixties Entrance Exam last Friday, with the maths section of the last Newsday practice test. Today, I tackle the “Language Arts” in the hope that I have some; apparently, we do “Language Arts” and not “English” because we learn English as a second language, after “obscene”, “gutter”, “slang” and “we doesn’t give a firetruck, boy, haul yuh mama and yuh grammar.”