Listening to Elvis Costello on Fort Groyne seawall

Jul 24, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – I drove to the Fort Groyne seawall to kill time last Tuesday because I know the amount of time customers have to spend in the banks. My wife had gone to do a transaction at one of the banks. I grew up on the seawall from Fort Groyne in Kingston to what is now the Kitty pump station.

For years, since I was in primary school at St. Thomas More School on D’Urban Street, Wortmanvile, I would skip classes and visit my dad at his work place at the St. Stanislaus cricket ground, where he was the groundsman. After sharing his porridge, I would roam the entire seawall.

If any human has in his/her DNA, the ocean, beaches and seawall, then I do. I have been perambulating the seawall my entire life and I am still doing so. I saw a sad thing at the Fort Groyne seawall last week. It is not the incident in itself that is sad; it is the fact that it can happen in a country, where people just could not be bothered.

Boulders for rip-rap sea defence projects are stored at Fort Groyne. Last week the men in throwing the boulders with their Hymac, threw some of the boulders on the Fort Groyne jetty and broke the tip of it. I am not referring to the seawall itself but the little jetty that juts out into the ocean right in front of the coast guard building.

That jetty is a historical relic in Guyana and should be treated with utmost respect by the people of this country. It is more than 200 years old. The coast guard sentries told me they didn’t see when it happened. I called the contractor. He said he will fix it. I don’t know if that was just a brush off. Anyway back to Elvis Costello.

I chose Fort Groyne to relax while my wife spent her entire day in the bank because Fort Groyne has something the other parts of the entire Georgetown seawall do not have. If you are looking at the ocean with your binoculars, then all you see is the ocean and the sky. But at Fort Groyne you can actually see West Coast Demerara (WCD) sitting on top of the Atlantic Ocean. If you want to see one of the most beautiful images from any country, look at how the sun sets on WCD from Fort Groyne.

I played my favourite Costello song, “Everyday I write the book,” three times because I like the song a lot mostly for the movement of the base in the arrangement. The base in the song is splendid. There was a line in “Everyday I write the book,” that I never thought about for in recent years that I have been listening to it. It goes like this: “With my pen and electric typewriter.”

There and then at Fort Groyne, I remember the beginning of my career as a newspaper columnist. It began with a little red typewriter, Dr. Rupert Roopnaraine loan me for months. Then I graduated to an electric type writer. In today’s world the pen and the typewriter are gone forever.

As I reflect on those words of Costello, I think of my columnist days in paper form may be nearing an end. How many people in the world still stick with printed newspapers? There is almost complete gravitation to social media. I entered social media and now I know the pen and the electric typewriter and so many other things associated with my career in the media are gone forever.

James Bond appeared on the Gildarie-Freddie Show on social media last Monday evening, and at the time of writing, I received 231 emails on Bond, an amount of reactions I have never received from the public on anything I have written from 1988 onwards when I began my presence in the newspapers.

I will not stop writing columns because I owe a loyalty to Kaieteur News. I have been with the newspaper from its birth but forms of life in the world are changing rapidly. Maybe I will finally get a smart phone. Maybe I may get a Facebook page. People would stop and ask me on the seawall and in the National Park why I am still using a discman.

I don’t know why I do that. You can listen to thousands of songs on a flash drive. But I persist with my discman. I just received from overseas a box set of five CDs titled, “Julio 100.” The box contains 100 of Julio Iglesias songs. Maybe soon from now, I’ll listen to Julio the way most people listen to him today – on a flash drive on their phone or in their car.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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Listening to Elvis Costello on Fort Groyne seawall

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