Newsletter for
alumni of The Abbey School, Mt. St. Benedict, Trinidad and Tobago, W.I.
Caracas, 11 of May 2019 No. 914
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Dear Friends,
A short article, Don
explaining how he manages the Blog pages:
And, an article from
Wayne Vincent Brown from 2002.
-----------------------------------
Don
Mitchell <idmitch@anguillanet.com>
To:
GEORGE MICKIEWICZ
Jan
27 at 1:13 PM
Sure, George,
Since
you are the only person (other than Ladislao) who has the slightest interest in
how I post the Circulars, I’ll explain the method in my madness.
Ideally,
Ladislao would send me one Circular every week and I would post it that week.
Because
Ladislao is busy and can only work on the Circulars intermittently, he sends me
sometimes four or five a week, and then goes quiet for a month or two.
So,
what I do is to keep at least one or two emailed Circulars on hold.
When a
couple of weeks go by with no Circular from Ladislao, I go into the cold
storage and warm up one or two I have on hold.
If he
runs a few months late, and sends me several at a time, then I post two at a
time, but seldom or never more than two a week.
There
is a reason for never exceeding two at any one time.
The
home page of Blogger cannot hold more than two of the Circulars.
If
anymore are posted, only the two last ones show on the home page.
The
earlier ones are hidden.
You
have to use the Blog archive to select and read the earlier ones.
I
cannot be sure more than one or two of the alumni would understand how to do
that.
Earlier
this week I posted two Circulars, and sent out a reminder notice.
I now
have three or four in storage (two arrived today).
Sometime
in the coming week I’ll probably publish another two and send out a notice as
usual.
Hope
that helps.
If you
have any suggestion, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Best,
Don
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Here is an old
article written by my classmate
What 'common cold' |
Wayne Brown
In Our Time
Wayne Brown
Sunday, May 12, 2002
THE sum of the
misery it has caused down the centuries is probably greater, if such things
could be measured, than that attributable to any, more epic illness or war. Yet
we continue to damn with faint complaint the ubiquitous "common
cold". Even as an alibi proffered by employees gone AWOL or defaulting
dates, it runs a blear fourth to headaches, gastro and the flu -- as though it
were a matter for sheepishness to confess: "I have a cold."
Part
of the reason for this is that, unlike, say, double pneumonia, colds are
presumed not to kill, nor even to cause undue pain. So it seems unmanly or
self-indulgent like the ancient mariner to "stoppeth one in three",
waylay some fellow-worker or wedding guest with news of what is after all the
most important influence on your current mood: that you have a cold. It's only
at home, as a rule, in the company of those doomed to know you best, that you
feel free to expand into that voluptuous self-pity that is the moral outrider
of the germ.
There
is some evidence, by the way, that in such circumstances men regress more
drastically than women: a fact upon which your feminist will pounce with a
brute "Aha!", but which, your chauvinist will say portentously (and
sonorously, if he has a cold), proves the nobility of manliness. "Why is
it," complained Shirley Booth, "that men who can go through severe
accidents, air raids and other major crises, seem to think they are at death's
door when they have a simple head cold?" Because, Ms Booth (will reply
your chauvinist, plagiarizing Keats), "He wast not born for imperfection,
immortal man!"
But
such displays of congested wretchedness are in the main domestic indulgences.
Out in the world, we downplay our colds, profess to find them, at worst,
irritating.
Well,
irritating they are! But presenting them as such is also a canny way of
averring a certain unfriendly distance between ourselves and the strange
invader (though that's not what Martin Carter meant by the phrase). And why we
do so is also the second reason for our covert sheepishness in attesting that
we are, if not under the influence of influenza, then at least in the clutch of
a cold: our secret guilt at the thought that a cold, unlike chicken pox, say,
is something we bring on ourselves.
Tell
someone you have a headache or rickets, colitis or kidney stones, and you've a
fair chance of attracting at least a counterfeit sympathy. But tell even your
closest relative -- mother, sister, daughter, wife -- that you've got a cold,
and chances are you'll get blamed: for having walked in the rain, or stood in a
draft, or stayed in those wet clothes too long. If there's been a dominant echo
dogging this columnist's footsteps down the aisle of the years, it has been
that of a shadowy female voice, beginning when I was two or three, berating me
for standing around morosely in the rain, hands in my pockets, looking down and
wriggling my toes.
Nietzsche,
as you would expect, if you knew Nietzsche, was apt to get deep on the matter.
"Contentment," he professed, "preserves me from catching a cold.
Has a woman who knew she was well dressed ever caught cold? No, not even when
she had scarcely a rag on her back." And the English diarist Samuel Pepys
was prepared to treat his own cold as a kind of combination
crime-and-punishment. "At night to supper," he wrote morosely,
"though with little comfort, I find myself both head and breast in great
pain, and, what troubles me most, my right ear is almost deaf. It is a cold,
which God Almighty in justice did give me while I sat lewdly sporting with Mrs
Lane the other day with the broken window in my neck." Which nicely yokes
courtship and chills, lechery and divine litigation, and proffers to Pepys'
Adam Mrs Lane as Eve, recumbent under a serpentine draft.
All
this obfuscates the unpopular truth: that we secretly like our colds, denounce
them as we will. What else but a cold can so effectively yet inconsequentially
return a man from windy contemplation of the world to morose and pleasurable
self-absorption? Who cares about nuclear war when the knife of a cold is at his
throat? What difference does it make whether Mr Patterson gets or doesn't get
his fourth term, to a man in the ecstatic throes of lift-off into a sneeze?
When last was the world so naggingly simple, reduced to an achiness and watery
eyes, a gingerly phenomenon, thick, thick?
And
so, in tribute to that germ (and also in reedy counterpoint to a baritone age
of prostate cancer, heart disease and AIDS) this columnist thinks he should
bear witness to the unsung anatomy of the champion steamroller germ of all
time.
The First Symptom:
The first symptom
that the enemy is covertly within the gates is so subtle you invariably miss
it. This is a small deviation from your normal response to -- anything; a
deviation so slight that you don't notice it. At the beach you decline to go
back in for a second dip. At the cinema the thought crosses your mind that this
movie is a long movie, boy! What's happening is that, under attack, your body
is calling for quarter, but calling in such a sheepish whisper (the attack,
after all, hardly feels serious) that you fail to hear it.
The Second Symptom:
The second symptom
(which you may also miss) is that you forget something you would never
otherwise forget: leave your wallet at home, for example, or drive straight
past the vendor from whom you've stopped to buy the papers every other day of
your life. Translation: Your body, more preoccupied now with the invader germ
(the battle is getting serious) is, unknown to you, calling up reserves from
the energy cells of habit, leaving some habits momentarily unattended.
The Third Symptom:
The third symptom is
the most intriguing. It is a memory of something or someone you haven't thought
of in 20 years: a memory fragmented and unbidden that, moreover, ingeniously
mixes its metaphors, so that what you suddenly recall is not, say, the tune of
an old song but its smell, not the smile of some long-gone girl but the pastel,
water-tinkling perfume of her smile. What's happening is that your body,
desperately throwing more forces into a battle which it is already losing, is pressganging
these from the praetorian guards of the subconscious, leaving memory
momentarily like a classroom from which the teacher has been called by an
urgent phone call telling him his landlady/ helper/ gardener is dead, and does
he know his or her next of kin? Etc.
That
errant memory -- or it may be a weird, inconsequential dream -- is really the
end of the story. Now follows swiftly the banal bodily defeat you can no longer
deny: the frog in the throat, the aching eyes, the aching joints, the knife at
the throat, the runny nose, the clogged head, the ague ripples; lastly, the
cold triumphant, the cold 'on the chest', the gung-ho resonant oh-god-help-me
coughing, the damn' cold!
One
day, no doubt, a president of the United States will find himself unusually
susceptible to colds. And five years and three billion dollars of research
money later, the common cold will be banished for good from the face of the
earth. Buh dill den, bay dribute, bortal ban, to duh boas zugzevul dgerm.
---------------------------------------------------------------.
Sent by George
Mickiewicz
-------------------------------------------------------------------.
From Luciano Mellone, The translation is by Google
Estimado Ladislao,
You do not know how
much it makes me happy that by this means and thanks to the great work that you
have been carrying out many of the ex- students of the Abbey have been able to
have contact and so be able to remember old times, since many of us in fact were
very young for then 11, 12 or 13 of age.
Recently I have had contact
via telephone with ALFREDO MONTIEL (Fofeo) (Venezuela), SALVADOR COSCARAT (the
USA), ALLOY GARNER (Canada), ANTONIO ZANELLA (Venezuela), WBLADIMIRO DIAZ
(Venezuela), CARLOS MANEIRO (Venezuela) and the MOFFIE brothers (Venezuela). Attached I am sending photos of my
companions of our class taken in the year 72, 73.
I am
thankful if you could identify them with # so that I can provide some names for
their identification.
In the
annexed photo the first line at the last row from left to right::
Juan
Gerald Cesarino, Luciano Mellone, David Holmes, Wbladimir Diaz, Jean Pierre
Tardieu, within the group is other two Venezuelans Carlos Maneiro and Gustavo
Tar.
I
would like if you could calls me to my cellular and so to be able to organize
better the photos.
Saludos
Luciano mellone
0414 – 8964362
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Estimado Ladislao,
A very
important point, up first floor we could see a person watching what’s going on.
guess wo ????????? Father
Cuthbert. always watching ( if ) something went wrong.
Saludos
Luciano Mellone
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EDITED by Ladislao
Kertesz, kertesz11@yahoo.com, if you would like to be in the
circular’s mailing list, please subscribe, it is 52 usd for a year, one issue a
week.
Help me get to the
newsletter 1000, the money is needed to cover the materials etc. to prepare the
Circular.
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Photos:
14LK3835FBLME, Luciano Mellone and wife
58RB0003a5NBO, Nigel Boos
15KA0122KABGRP, Yunnus Ali, Kazim Abasali, UNKNOWN Peter Tang
72LM0002CLASS1973, Luciano Mellone Class
