I know I risk sounding again like Cassandra. However it still seems to me important for us to reflect about whether our economy is in danger of becoming over-dependent on a too narrow range of activities. The best time to raise such questions is when, like now, the economy is doing well. At such a time, the momentum and confidence needed to launch new initiatives can be more effective.

True, services sectors offer a wide variety of options to follow. We are doing well in trying to extend our range of existing activities by introducing new ones in health and education.

Even so, we need greater progress in the technical skills of electric and electronic engineering, including digital. At least, available statistics do not show a real increase in production under their headings.

A friend opines that making this point actually implies a nostalgia for the seventies, with their shipyards and the new industries being set up that were suitable for those days. Perhaps.

***

Cardenal

The recent death of Fernando Cardenal in Nicaragua went almost unnoticed here. A dedicated Jesuit and a protagonist of liberation theology, Cardenal joined the Sandinist government to lead the education ministry.

He brushed aside the pressure placed on him by Rome to abandon this assignment since according to the Vatican it was compromising his position. His reply was: the Church has been compromising its position in favour of the rich for centuries; why should I not compromise my position for a short while, in favour of the poor?

He had to leave the Jesuit order though he stood by its religious discipline. Meanwhile he mobilised thousands of young people and sent them to teach poor farmers to read and write. Nicaragua's illiteracy rate fell from 50 to 13 per cent.

Years later, he left the Sandinist government, claiming it had become corrupt.

Later still, he was allowed to rejoin the Jesuit order, for which he had to start his noviciate all over again.

Cardenal and people of his stamp deserve our full respect and esteem.

***

Strait Street

George Cini's extremely interesting book "Strait Street" is meant to provide more information by which to recall a street that in the author's words "used to illuminate the City". His method is to allow you into a world half familiar, half bizarre, there to introduce you to vivacious people and the life they lead in a close-knit community.

Cini has the masterful skills of a veteran journalist in the way by which he focuses on those details in a street, a wineshop or an apartment block that give direct evidence as to how life is being lived. But he goes beyond such effects to provide a panoramic view of the diverse entertainments available in the establishments of the narrow street in caption.

Personally I have faded memories of it, and how it used to be, mostly as experienced "from outside", in the days of its last revival, towards the end of the sixties of the previous century. In this his second book about it, Cini ensures that our collective memory of Strait Street doesn't stay one from "the outside". It should become registered as an integral element of our history.