I cooked the goose. It was an 11lb bird, seasoned with herbs sown and reaped in the foothills of the Northern Range in Trinidad, which I brought back from my trip to the Caribbean in mid-September. Four cloves of garlic, two dashes of Angostura bitters, soy sauce, salt and pepper, and a ten-year-old pepper sauce from that tiny island where I was born: all these were massaged into the goose, which was pricked all over with a needle so that the juices penetrated through during the three days before Christmas. A chicken-liver stuffing, and a gravy prepared with the giblets of the bird, completed the formalities.

On Christmas morning, the children and grandchildren came for our annual Christmas breakfast. It is not our usual fare; this is a special meal, made from food exported to the Caribbean islands to feed the slaves. Salt cod and smoked herring were shipped by the Portuguese and, even now, the best salt cod can be bought only at Portuguese delicatessens.

The cod is soaked and soaked again overnight, then stripped into small pieces; you add olive oil with a free hand, and then oodles of tomatoes and onions. The smoked herring is roasted in a naked fire, then stripped and deboned; olive oil is again liberally sprinkled. Both dishes are topped with boiled eggs and avocado.

So each Christmas the children devour the food of their ancestors. There is symbolism, too. Christ comes out of Christmas and is replaced by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the only successful slave rebellion in the Caribbean.

I tell you all this only because you are unlikely to have the faintest idea of how a family of Caribbean origin celebrates Christmas. Nowhere in British journalism, except in this column, can you find any consistent reportage and analysis of societies that have shaped a large and important section of the British population - palate and all.

Just before the holidays, readers of British papers, and viewers of and listeners to BBC news, discovered that the islands of Trinidad and Tobago, where I was born, are soaked in the blood of the innocent. NS readers would have been well prepared for that story. A family of three elderly people in Cascade - a quiet middle-class suburb of Port of Spain - including a former BBC broadcaster and an environmentalist, had their throats cut, their heads almost severed from their bodies. It has been reported that a crazed nephew did the deed. Beware! Nothing is what it seems in the Caribbean. Like the seasoned goose, the juices percolate five to six layers beneath the skin.

Letter writers to Caribbean newspapers, and some to the NS, have castigated me, accusing me of besmirching the social reputation of our islands. These experts stick their heads in the sand and leave their backsides in the air, exposed to the heat of the sun.

They say to me: look at the extent of barbarism elsewhere. No doubt they will now draw my attention to the recent case of Roy Whiting, the paedophile who slaughtered a young girl in England. They do not see the historical context: I am referring to a violence that has grown in intensity over a period of social and economic change. It was one thing yesterday, it is another today, and we are heading for the abyss tomorrow.

A calypsonian at the Notting Hill Carnival sang about my propensity to focus on the negative in the Caribbean and not the "nice" places like Cascade and St Ann's. Yet, on Christmas night, three young men were sitting in a car on Prince Street, a busy road in the heart of Port of Spain where I have walked a thousand times. A young man walked up, murdered the three and walked away. The dead were all from St Ann's.

The BBC owes an epitaph to Lynette Lithgow, its late broadcaster, so brutally executed. It should send a documentary team to visit the island, to reveal the morass of blood and gore into which the people have sunk. This is an island stuffed rich with seams of natural gas and oil - a goose that threatened, but failed, to lay a golden egg.

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