While I gulp at my fifth coffee of the morning and ignore the greyness that passes for Thursday in icy Nubia Way, I’m suspended in a Trini time warp stretching back to 1938.

Thanks to the sterling efforts of the Classic Calypso Collective, the indefatigable Dr John Cowley and their considerably overweight baby West Indian Rhythm (a ten-CD set of Decca calypso recordings 1938-40, with an equally overweight but priceless accompanying tome), I’m listening to a classic Atilla kaiso, recorded in the first half of the 20th century but only now hitting the airwaves.

If you want to know what affronted the colonial censor so, the title alone should suffice: The Banning of Records. But after all those wasted years, I can’t resist setting some of Atilla’s lyrics free at last:

Imagine our records being banned from entering in our native land…

That they are obscene, I must deny

But all things look yellow to the jaundiced eye.

I think they’re ungenerous

To attempt to take our music from us.

All local talent, is my contention,

Should be given help and recognition.

For all their boards I don’t give a rap;

We have put this island on the map.

For, from New York, Haiti and Curacao,

On stage, gramophone and radio,

Every chance that these boys have had

They have glorified and advertised Trinidad…

Honi soit qui mal y pense! Is my cry.

Evil to him who thinketh evil says I.

It’s known a man with a perverted mind

With the most moral work, some fault he will find.

If Netty Netty is indecent, then, I must insist

That so is Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

But o’er these writers they make no fuss

But, poor we, they want to take our music from us.

There, that’s my contribution to the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the British abolition of the slave trade, which so far I’ve found so muted I could have missed it altogether. These Brits don’t miss a stroke (except in the World Cup) and I suspect the current censorship of this particular anniversary has a lot to do with ignoring the growing call for reparation.

Anyway, he who will not be moved before he’s ready, the only man in the world who’s still convinced Saddam was the master of WMD, is playing it smart right down to the wire. Two-timing Tony has avoided giving any official apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade (never mind the practice of slavery) and can therefore continue to play deaf, an ability even his most severe critics will grant he has mastered.

But enough of these overseers. All is not entirely lost in Little Britain, at least not as far as I’m concerned. It seems finally, at this late stage in my life, I’ve acquired a guardian angel. Let me explain.

Big Fug-born Trini angel

Back in 2005, I embarked on a part time MA in Caribbean literature and Creole poetics at the fount of innovative scholarship and diversity, Goldsmiths College, London University. With my eventual return to the Caribbean in mind, I thought the opportunity to study some of the major texts of Creole theory and learn Haitian Creole would stand me in good stead.

With much gritting of teeth, hair tearing, headaches (courtesy postcolonial and postmodern critics) and library fines, I made it through the first year. Then came my final year and with it the prospect of finding some $17,000 to pay my tuition fees. I skated through the first term without the fees office debarring me. I’ve even got to within a week of the end of my last term of seminars, without handing over a cent from the Levi coffers. This was the easiest part, as the family vault, safety deposit boxes and my pockets were all empty.

It began to look, even for a confirmed optimist or a magician, that my academic career was over, on the brink of completion. The mitigating circumstances didn’t look too promising either. Having carelessly lost my indentureship in the plantation of employment (another tussle with the overseers) and along with it the (rented) family mansion in long-gone leafy Forest Hill, all I had to look forward to was the debtor’s gaol, ignominy and the heart of darkness.

Someone somewhere must have given me a bush bath or alerted my Orisha Ochun, who manifested in the form of one Sharon Alleyne, the manager of the Student Funding office at Goldsmiths. She called me out of the blue on a bleak morning a couple of weeks back to drop the happy bombshell that my application for funds had been successful.

Something in her voice made me ask if she was a Trini. She is indeed a Big Fug-born Trini, who all now is holidaying in the land of her parents.

So if you pass a woman whose halo is thawing out, that’s her, and give her a hail from me.

Sharon, I owe yuh gyul—now all I have to do is my Haitian Creole essay and exam and a dissertation. Meanwhile, send my love to sweet T&T. I coming to come.