Forty years ago, May 1974 to be exact, I saw a football match in Germany. It wasn't World Cup or European Cup or anything of the sort. I t was just an ordinary club match in Cologne between two teams whose names meant nothing to me. I never bothered to find out. What I do remember is that the stadium was packed to capacity, there was a great deal of noise, and mine was the only black face in the crowd.
Fast forward to a decade later when I lived in England. I yearned to see a football match and especially to see John Barnes play. My colleagues warned me off. Don't go there," they insisted. I thought they might have been exaggerating, but they said for their own safety, black people did not go into the soccer stands in England. If I wanted to see John Barnes play, look at television.
It was, of course, different with cricket. We had changed the colour of the cricket grounds in London, particularly in June 1950 at Lord's where Kitchener serenaded enthusiastic West Indians after the spin twins, Ramadhin and Valentine, plus centuries by Alan Rae and Clyde Walcott rubbed British noses into the hallowed turf.
So even without consulting my colleagues, I saw test cricket at Lord's and Headingley, Leeds, without discomfort of any kind.
I had wanted to see British football in England perhaps because as a youngster on the Guardian sports desk I had, so to speak, grown up with club names like Arsenal, Everton, Chelsea and star names such as Stanley Matthews. For, apart from the local game, we published no football other than the English competitions, from the league championships to the FA Trophy.
My desire to see a German match might have been fuelled by an unscheduled meeting with my old friend and Malvern clubmate, Fedo Blake, the goal-scoring machine for his club in the 1950s.
There was I walking casually down a street in Hamburg watching the sights and who should I see coming in the opposite direction but the familiar figure of the old Fedo then practising medicine in Germany.
I needn't go into detail here about how we embraced and jumped up and down like mad men on the people's sidewalk, so happy were we to see each other. We talked about everything but football and he later that day took me on a daytime and, indeed, nighttime tour of the city. It was a most illuminating tour, especially the one after dark.
I toured a number of cities travelling by boat, train and aircraft. The names, Bonn, Munich, a Carnival city if there is one in Germany, Dresden, Dusselburg, Munster, the Luneberg Heath, Wursburg pop up and on to the memory table. Leipzig was not on my schedule. In West Berlin I stood on the Berlin Wall looked down into East Germany-it was that postwar period when two Germanies existed side by side.
And during all that travel over two weeks, I met only three Caribbean men. The other Trinidadian, bedides Fedo, was Francis Charles, better known as "Popsy", the Litle Carib dancer who had migrated and then ran a record shop in West Berlin. "Popsy" gave me two "no sleep nights" as part of his welcome to an old friend and fellow citizen.
The third Caribbean man was an old acquaintance, Keith Johnson, then Jamaican Ambassador to Germany. He and his wife hosted me to lunch at their home and introduced me to their twin daughters before the three of us went off to one of those diplomatic functions. Both Charles and Johnson have since passed on.
It won't be like this next June. Leipzig is going to be packed tight with Trinis come to see the Soca Warriors play. Some of them will have been resident Trinidadians anxious to touch base with their fellow countrymen.
But the betting is a formidable corps of Trinidadians will find the money and the time between now and then to buy tickets and secure accommodation for the match against Sweden, hoping against hope that we would move into the second round.
Memory of my one trip to Germany and seeing a soccer match there between two teams whose names I cannot remember and whose players may have been or gone on to be internationals, surfaces at a time when reading the daily newspapers and listening to the radio or watching television is an agonising process.
We seem to have developed, albeit slowly, a criminal class well armed with the latest and deadliest in weaponry and whose hobby seems to be getting involved in the drug trade.
Trinis used to boast that while other people murdered because for most of them it was their profession, our killings were principally crimes of passion. It is no longer so. Some of our criminals seem to enjoy their work. Why else would someone with a gun stand over a helpless body lying on the ground and pump six to twelve bullets into it? The feeling that political action will make a difference tells how near to hopeless the situation is. For we have a government with plenty money but up to its ears in seemingly unsolvable problems or challenges, whichever word one prefers, and an imploding Opposition party bent on committing political suicide.