Good news. Bad news. First the good news: November marks the end of a hurricane-less hurricane season. Bad news: stress is killing us.

An overwrought loader at a taxi terminus considering himself dissed unmercifully chops a taxi-driver with a machete until he nearly dies; a mild-mannered professional man is pushed past the limit by a man who robs his mango tree despite repeated warnings and shoots the thief dead.

The pressures of life, reinforced by negative headlines and even more disquieting rumours, are making our daily existence intolerable. We start doing things we probably wouldn’t normally do and a little piece of good news makes us quite irrational.

Look at the poor old liquidator, Mr Wildman, the man who is searching for the Cash Plus millions. He makes the mistake of saying he thinks he can lay his hands on 25 of them in an Arab bank and make a part-payment by Christmas. Next day his office is invaded by dozens of Cash Plus sufferers. Mind you, Mr Wildman is actually looking for the J$4 billion owed to 40,000 Jamaicans.

Even more stressful is the situation 6000 Olint investors find themselves in. They would like to get back their US$220 million, of which the liquidator has only identified US$14 million so far. Curiously, only 376 people have made a claim on this amount. What are the other 5,264 waiting for? One theory is that they don’t want anyone to know who they are, particularly the tax authorities who are anxious for their share. As one UK fraud investigator put it, the Jamaican government may be reluctant to bring Olint’s David Smith down as his investors included members of parliament, well-known Jamaican personalities and prominent families.

What did we expect in the something-for-nothing, it’s-all-about-me society we have been living in for the past 30 years, a society governed by successive waves of politicians who focused on getting re-elected from the first day they sat in Gordon House?

Our culture today is characterised by crony capitalism, celebrity mania, flagrant corruption and politricks. How about the other night, when we waited up expecting the prime minister to tell us how his government was going to stem the flow of red ink in the public sector? And now he intends to wait another six months with countless committees, endless commissions and time-wasting conferences to decide what to do, when and how. if at all.

The A-list social butterflies and the A-list wannabes dodge reality by being photographed by the press, BlackBerrys in hand, at any number of shiny new nightclubs and at Mas Camp or similar. Those a lot further down the income scale are dreaming the impossible dream by buying Lotto, SuperLotto and entering a variety of text-in product competitions while looking forward to Sunday racing to solve their financial woes.

In the Good Old Days we would throw the Christians to the lions to distract us, but fortunately we have Usain Bolt and our Olympians instead. I suppose you could say for the lucky few it’s been good while it’s lasted. But I think we’re like the man who took Cialis but who still had an erection after four hours, and had to call for help despite his good fortune.

On the international front we continue to be taking a beating, it seems. Sir Trevor McDonald (Trinidadian by birth, wouldn’t you know) focused on our seamy side during a British television series, earlier this year. Then there’s been a recent barrage of bad press because of our preference for homophobia and our enthusiasm for the death penalty.

In the spring an English journalist, Ian Thomson, completed his “Tales of Modern Jamaica” entitled Dead Yard (the publisher’s choice). The book has not been distributed in the island because our lawyers deemed sections of it to be legally actionable.

Undeniably thoroughly researched (although no one under 40 was interviewed), it contains several inaccuracies and numerous exaggerations which reflect his relentlessly-pursued agenda – 21st- century manifestations of slavery, the consequence of the colonial overhang, the wealth gap, the axis of power between politicians

and criminals.

Interviewed, Sally Henzell (he liked her and her late husband Perry Henzell of The Harder They Come fame) got it right when she skewered him with “You know I don’t trust you one jot. You sly mongoose. You ole r**s, you.” To which Thomson responded, “Writers are a low, creepy breed.” One thing is for sure, there are quite a number of Jamaican homes into which no journalist will ever be invited again.

On the positive side, I was able to catch a BBC TV series hosted by Levi Roots, alias Keith Graham, a 50-year- old Jamaican immigrant, whose theme was “put some music into your food”. His exuberant style and endless enthusiasm demonstrated all that’s good about our island and our food. One episode was filmed in Trelawny. Both on television and in his two cookbooks his colourful depiction of Jamaica was refreshing. God knows we need all the help we can get.