GEOF BROWN, bless him for his generosity, has just written, somewhat to my surprise, some very nice things about me. I wish I really did have the wit to give people some solid laughter about our predicament, but the truth is the more I give thought to this predicament, the more unreal it seems to become.

Mr. Brown claims that I sometimes make people laugh, but what really happens when FINSAC, the Union Bank, Dr. Omar Davies, Derick Latibeaudiere, and every Tom, Dick, and political Harry all get going, is that the whole thing becomes hilarious. I wish I could take the credit for amusing people, but this isn't really true. All I try to do is to tell things as they are, and then suddenly in the telling a sort of comedy emerges.

All these worthy financial players acting out their vast billions of imaginary money may in one sense be clowns, but, like all really good clowns, they contain within themselves a quality of deep sadness; of pathos as well as bathos.

At what may soon be the end of half a century of sometimes desperate scribbling, I shall end where I began, with precious little to show for it all. Laugh clown laugh!... Weep clown weep! That's the fine kettle of fish in which sooner or later I shall find myself.

Final wish

Finally just one more wish. May we see the end at last of Y2 bloody K and may we learn in the next thousand years not to destroy our planet. Let it be "Jamaica land we love" rather than Jamaica land we love to pollute.

I regard self-indulgence as a sort of sin. Just recently I became rather ill and, although my doctor says that I have recovered, I find that my recent columns have become dull, and have lost their sparkle. Certain things have not improved. While the Prime Minister still dwells on cloud nine, Dr. Davies and Derick Latibeau-diere are now quite unable to understand national finances and the whole quality of life seems to have gone to hell.

It is necessary to note that Eddie Seaga is showing remarkable improvement. Indeed the entire JLP seems at last to be pulling together, and is showing every indication of at last becoming a real political party again. Audley Shaw is once more becoming a force to be reckoned with. So let us all hope that, in one way or another, the millennium, or whatever, will show promise of things getting a bit better.

Perhaps, I should even increase my ration of Vodka Martinis, and on occasion get slightly sloshed, though I don't suppose that will do much good except to increase the already disgracefully high duties on liquor.

A fine kettle of fish

I could be thinking about boiling a few fat Salmon in well salted water. But what I'm really thinking about is a strange financial institution called the Union Bank. Some very expensive experts put four bust banks together with great ingenuity making one bigger bust bank, and nobody knows what's going to happen to it. In one way or another, it forms a part of FINSAC and that's another kettle of fish.

Every now and then somebody buys a hotel or two for a few millions and our financial people get cock-a-hoop about it. But the few millions don't make a dent in anything. It's the billions that sit there glaring at FINSAC, which is more a figment of imagination than anything else.

What FINSAC really has, is a great mountain of paper which I believe some people call "bonds", and which are worth little or nothing.

There's something else, though, which I find diverting, though I don't really understand much of it.

But in some mysterious way I hear talk about getting the Union Bank together with NCB. That's another kettle of fish. The prime achievement of NCB was to lose half of its debts, and, from what I hear, that bank is ploughing on regardless, the idea being to consummate some sort of marriage between NCB and Union Bank with FINSAC acting as best man.

The accepted wisdom is that it doesn't really matter what goes on with NCB because, say the pundits, NCB is too big to bust. This sounds to me like "famous last words", but never mind.

In the meantime, a much smaller drama is being played out by some top actors. The good Dr. Davies and the, of course, governor of the Bank of Jamaica, are playing computer games.

The huge debts owed to the people of Jamaica keep on increasing. This is really a flight of fancy rather than a financial fact, though to tell the truth, I find it increasingly difficult to tell the difference between financial fact and financial fancy.

Being rather poor I can to a certain extent grasp the meaning of a million or two, but as soon as anybody takes me into the billions I get hopelessly out of my depth.

'A time of consuming interest'

Daniel Thwaites wrote a delightful piece about sundry inventions. Among other things he mentioned elastic brassieres (in the 1920s) and silicone breast implants a good deal later. But no doubt because of his youth Daniel failed to mention the inflatable bra.

Sometime around the late 1940s, I was crossing the Atlantic from London to New York (no jets then) in an aeroplane with four Rolls Royce Marlin engines, and rather uncertain pressurization. Sitting in a seat next to me was an attractive girl. I noticed however that as the flight progressed her breasts were increasing in size, and at 30,000 feet, with some pressurization and an oxygen mask, her breasts become quite alarmingly large. Suddenly they burst with disastrous consequences. As far as I know that was the end of inflatable bras.