MANY TRINIDADIANS – and Tobagonians, too – spent Wednesday’s Republic Day holiday cleaning up after this year’s worst floods (so far) and you can’t blame them for not being in the right mood to reflect on our republican status.

When you’re shovelling a tonne of mud out of your bedroom, so that you can get your fridge and TV down from the top of the clothes closet, the only place they could stay dry, your thoughts don’t naturally run to listing the innumerable practical advantages of not having Queen Elizabeth as your head of state.

Or having a president whose greatest asset, you’ve learned from bitter experience, is that he or she remains permanently unnoticed, occasionally quietly holding tea parties for foreign dignitaries (instead of regularly kicking domestic constitutional or political marabunta nests).

EVERY NOW AND then, usually when I’m waiting for something on which a great deal turns, like the Israeli election result, or the British Supreme Court decision on Bozo’s see-through prorogation of Parliament to try to smash through a hard Brexit, I find myself wondering, if I died today, what would happen to me?

Of course, I know the answer: I’d go back to wherever I was for all time before I got here and I’d remain there, in that other place, wherever the firetruck it might be, for the same period, i.e., the rest of all time.

So, in truth and in fact, Nothing (with a capital en) would happen to me.

Hell of a thing, Nothing.

IT FIGURES THAT what might be the worst week of the year should end with a Black Friday... So I take one hellish aspect of the week – the 9/11 anniversary – and try to make it less bad by imagining what might have happened if, everything else being the same, the attack happened, not in 2001, but today. This could be the exchange on the Oval Office hotline.

BREXIT REMINDS me of the chikungunya virus: every time you think, “This couldn’t get any more painful”, it promptly does; the lesson must be that one mustn’t tempt Providence, viruses or evil mop-headed clowns who sneak een to 10 Downing Street through the back door of Eton.

Three years ago – the same year the world was blighted with Fat Nixon (and through the same digital manipulation of emotions by Cambridge Analytic-I’ma-Take-the-Money-and-Run) – everyone was so sure Leave would lose the yes-or-no referendum on Brexit, no one bothered to address the extent of the proposed disconnection from Europe or the way it was to be achieved.