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2010 and you know it’s election time in TnT when:
• Roads from Carenage and Cocorite flyover to Marabella Market suddenly get paved. • And paving gets done along Claxton Bay Road at 9 pm on a Saturday night with ten Jusamco trucks of material. • The words “party” and “seat” now apply respectively to the atmosphere at political gatherings and hotly contested locations rather than hot looking derrieres. • Candidates clamour to be your new BFF (Best Friend Forever) on Facebook • You remember 86 reasonsand countingto steups and block everybody’s request. • Babies have to duck. or request that politicians walk with hand sanitisers. • Patrick Manning dons a flowered shirt (in Tabaquite) and Kamla Persad-Bissessar wears the pants (in UNC ). • You can catch an Orange Sky performance, groove to Celine Dion or do the “Palance” and take in pan for free at the nearest political meeting. • Baliser flowers and crapauds, rum and roti become scarce. • All bets are off. • Unsurprisingly, pensioners get “surprises” in their cheques, three weeks before polling day. • That pothole in front your gate gets fixed four-and-a- half years after you complained about it. • An 81-year-old launches the latest dance move. • And Percy Villafana gives octogenerians everywhere new life by becoming a poster boy for gutsiness. • Your MP suddenly appears. Along with his boss. • Everybody’s walking and not just for the exercise or because their Jenny Craig diet can’t cut it. • You get a “personal message from the office” of so-and-so to attend a meeting. When you get there you find out 10,000 other people also received the same invite. • One party’s planning arsenal includes the “Art of War” and another tries taking cues from the script of “How To Train Your Dragon (Lady).” • Penny(s) are seen as old political currency. • Everyone wants to get to the Hart of the matter. • The chips start fallingin May. • Unity becomes vogue. Again. • Diego Martin West becomes the most important seat to the PNM. • Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday start quoting each other. • And each fervently hopes none of their grandchildren will ever have a name beginning with the letter “K.” • The political cemetery loses a few corpses. And makes room for a whole lot more. • Some nominees become losers even before they ever get a chance to contest. • The Opposition takes aim at the three Cs: Crime, corruption and Calder. • The Government returns fire with other Cs: Coalition collapse. • Figures count and nobody’s talking about 36-24-36. Or the Trini equivalent of 42-28-46, give or take a couple inches. • The voice of the people is the voice of (screening commitee) Board. • COP starts working like ‘cops’. • Everybody’s poll puts them ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, the lightpole on your street is still leaning after three months. • You think twice about the colour jersey you want to wear (to go out.) • You receive so many free party T-shirts, Rover gets his own (to sleep on) • Promises abound more than the burnt grass on the slopes of the Northern Range. • But no one promises to enforce laws to nail culprits who start bush fires. • It ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings and Marlene Mc Donald is still on stage. • You realise just how much more power resides in your index finger when you use it on one particularelectionday as compared to the amount of power in your middle finger which you have to use several times a day. courtesy Gail Alexander Published: 4 May 2010, Trinidad Guardian http://guardian.co.tt/news/general/2010/05/04/you-know-it-s-election-time |