Forty-sev­en teach­ers from 20 pri­vate schools across Trinidad and To­ba­go have par­tic­i­pat­ed in a mas­ter­class aimed at help­ing ed­u­ca­tors ad­dress body im­age con­cerns and self-es­teem among young peo­ple.

Cro­chet­ing is a skill in which the av­er­age young per­son may not be in­ter­est­ed, but 18-year-old Aliyah Pope has turned it in­to a busi­ness. Un­der her brand Tia­Hooked­It, she crotch­ets swim­suits, pants, shirts, hand­bags, hair ties, buck­et hats, key chains and a num­ber of oth­er items, which can be or­dered from her on­line store.

A few days ago, a fel­low crick­et head pulled me aside and posed a straight­for­ward ques­tion: “How would you rate the West In­dies’ white-ball tour to In­dia?” Af­ter mulling it over for a few sec­onds and work­ing on a scale from one to ten (where a one is an ab­solute, un­mit­i­gat­ed dis­as­ter and a ten is pure, flaw­less per­fec­tion), I set­tled firm­ly on a nine out of ten. A ten would have re­quired a clean sweep of every sin­gle match, but a rat­ing of nine places this cam­paign square­ly in the “Very Good” cat­e­go­ry.

Though the Na­tion­al Trust of T&T (NT) had its Sep­tem­ber 26 out­door ac­tiv­i­ty head­lined sim­ply as an “Oropouche La­goon Tour”, its itin­er­ary en­sured that there was more than a fair share of food, thrills and triv­ia.

The tone adopt­ed by a prime min­is­ter mat­ters, par­tic­u­lar­ly in a coun­try where po­lit­i­cal ex­changes can quick­ly be­come con­tentious. Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has nev­er been re­luc­tant to speak plain­ly, but some of her re­cent rhetoric rais­es ques­tions about whether that forth­right style is be­com­ing un­nec­es­sar­i­ly con­fronta­tion­al.