Dylan’s famous protest song came to mind on Tuesday evening as I watched a rebroadcast of a House meeting convened earlier that day. On the government side there was the reincarnated John Compton, gnarled cheeks cupped in hands as familiar with the tools of banana farming as with the reins of power.

Shortly after the not-guilty verdict that set O J Simpson free of charges he murdered his former wife and her lover, my wife and I, accompanied by the then editor of this newspaper, were on a stop-over in Miami, en-route to Los Angeles.

Seven years ago the banana farmers of the Caribbean Island of St Lucia were hanging up their machetes, ready to turn their steep hillsides back to forest. British subsidies for their fruit were doomed, they could not compete with giant “dollar” bananas from South American plantations and a dying industry seemed to provide scant reward for back-breaking work.

It has never been clear to the regular eye exactly what is at the heart of Earl Bousquet’s joined-at-the-lips relationship with Beijing and Havana. On the surface it seemed the once upon a time press secretary to former prime minister Kenny Anthony had assumed a second official position as mouthpiece for the local embassies of China and Cuba, which automatically afforded the two stubbornly communist regimes preferential treatment at the expense of local taxpayers.

With England, New Zealand, Kenya and Canada scheduled to arrive here on Monday to play matches in the long-awaited ICC 2007 Cricket World Cup, it’s reality time for St Lucia’s Field of Dreams—The Beausejour Cricket Ground (BCG).

Who is Alloysius Mathurin? Just the latest of several people killed every year by vehicles, which many seem not to understand can be just as lethal as a knife or a gun in the wrong hands. The nation learned that Mathurin had been killed, allegedly by a hit and run driver, on the very morning that the rest of the country were proudly celebrating Independence Day.

In 2001, unlike in previous years, the prime minister’s New Year’s  message had begun on a particularly depressing note: “This has not been the best New Year for us and our country. We closed the year 2000 on a sad note, one of the saddest chapters in the history of our people. The events of the past week will continue to haunt most of us.”