The news in general in the last week has been very worrisome: dismal forecasts for the global economy, the state of health of people living everywhere being further endangered as the omicron variant of the coronavirus spreads unstoppably; the standoff between Russia and the West over the future of Ukraine; the unravelling of Afghanistan and its decline into near-failed-state status; the destruction of US democracy that is being actively pursued by Republicans; China’s increasingly bellicose behaviour; the unrelenting and violent grabbing of Palestinian homes by Jewish settlers in the occupied territories; near-civil war in Sudan; landslides and flooding and all manner of environmental nightmares, tigers and endangered species being sold on Facebook.

The list is unending but in the midst of it all some good sense from none other than Tobago Chief Secretary Farley Augustine. It was a simple but not insignificant bit of news with the power to cheer one up and restore balance to the madness of our present times. A tiny ray of light that raises the human spirit.

It followed the encouraging recent occurrence of his fledgling party's ousting the powerful PNM by tapping into the hearts of the people in Tobago and ousting the powerful and out-of-touch PNM, which had everything so tied up that its representatives needed never to listen any more to the electorate to whom they owed their power. The PNM could not even locate the beating heart of the people.

Now, the Chief Secretary simply announced the abandonment of the outdated and unreasonable rules governing how citizens dress while interacting with suffocating state officialdom in Tobago.

The overbearing, moribund state apparatus trundles on, however, in Trinidad.

A woman being made to cover her arms and all bits of her feet while in a government building is ludicrous. It is an opportunity for the army of sour-faced, fed up gatekeepers to follow their masters in a ritual abuse of power.

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I was once told by such a person that she could stop me from entering a building because the style of my shoe had a one-inch gap at the toe. She may have realised the nonsense of it and did allow me access, but she probably felt better by showing her potential power to thwart me.

I had already learned that slingback ladies' shoes are also against the rules, as ridiculous as that might seem. I once witnessed another such person, working in the Immigration Department of the Ministry of National Security, attempt to disallow a well-dressed woman whose elegant dress had insufficiently capped sleeves to enter for all of five minutes to collect a passport. I loaned the frantic victim my shawl and I waited outside.

The depressing aspect of such conventions is that we do not know why we indulge them, but we should not. They are relics of the control mechanisms used on the poor and unworthy members of society whose very presence was offensive to the ruling classes. They were ways of demeaning people and ex