BEFORE I GET TO PLUMPTON... (From The Argus)
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BEFORE I GET TO PLUMPTON...
12:00pm Sunday 1st January 2012
By Eivind Nerberg - Walk a Pavement Once Again »
In May 2006, during the Brighton Festival, and maybe a couple of weeks before we were due to return to Scotland, Suzi and I went along to the Dome to hear Christopher Hitchens talk and take questions about Tom Paine. It was one of the most wonderful evenings of our lives. Neither of us had seen him in person before – or have since. There is no need for me to recite the qualities he possessed. We left the hall knowing we’d been in the presence of a remarkable human being.
I have one regret about that evening. There was a book signing afterwards. With our luggage already swollen with Brighton memorabilia, was there space for another book? Suzi thought so; I wasn’t so sure and walked away. Looking back now, it seems like a petty act of betrayal. Had I done otherwise I would have one his signed books here in this flat and on its shelves. But that is a small loss. The greater one is that I failed to do what I should have done: shake Hitch’s hand.
I started this post two weeks ago, on 16 December, a few hours after hearing of his death. Initially I’d intended beginning it with reminiscences of our 2005 Brighton Hogmanay. So now, a tad belatedly, and two hundred sad words later… On New Year’s Eve I texted Suzi at the lingerie department where she worked saying, courtesy this newspaper: ‘racing at plumpton tomorrow. free bus from the railway station.’ (I liked that last bit!) Knowing we needed clear heads for the following day, Hogmanay alcohol consumption was rationed – but not to zero. The big question facing us was where to see in ‘the bells’. We quickly agreed on one thing: not indoors. The venue had to be emblematic of Brighton and where better than the pier? Before hitting the beach we hit a couple of pubs – one near the Old Ship Hotel, where a young, raucous but convivial crowd were in prep. for all-night partying. (Oh how we envied them their energy and livers.) Across the road at midnight we joined the other celebrants, taking a tipple from our flask, toasting 2006 and distributing a bit of seasonal Scottish tradition: shortbread. Something to drink would have been preferred no doubt, but the askance recipients were too polite to say so.
The occasion reminded Suzi and I of how blessed we were. Our long planned-for and greatly anticipated ephemeral emigration was, my backache apart, proving to be better than we’d ever imagined it could be. We texted family and friends and though we missed them hugely we knew that at least for one-night-only, we didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world.
The almost deserted streets we walked along the following morning and the dry, bracing air revived us. On Queens Road a newsagent’s was open and we bought the Racing Post and take-away coffees. Our awaiting coach looked forlorn: no other cars or buses were around. It was also forlorn inside: empty seats far outnumbering those occupied. But we didn’t care: this was Ne’er day with a difference – the first time we’d brought in the New Year at a race track and, true to what our Sussex adventure was all about, a ‘first and last time’ at Plumpton.
An hour later and within minutes of disembarking at the course Suzi was button-holing trainer Brendan Powell, who was in mid-conversation with one of his owners. In his riding days Brendan was inextricably linked with Dublin Flyer, a fine steeplechaser that had won Suzi a few quid, including once at Cheltenham where she’d shouted the Flyer on to victory. Now she had the chance – maybe a once in a lifetime chance – to tell Brendan how much he and the horse meant to her. With the said owner temporarily silenced Brendan was quizzed about all aspects of the Flyer including how was he keeping? (In good health and high spirits, she was assured). I was frantically tugging Suzi’s coat and eventually she took the hint. Unfortunately she didn’t take Brendan’s and recklessly lost a lot of dosh on one of his least promising runners.
It was a sign of worse to come. At high-altitude in mid-winter we spent much of the afternoon in the cosy, crowded racecourse café selecting one also-ran after another. Late in the afternoon she plunged her fingers into her handbag for one final bet in the ‘getting-out’ stakes. ‘Where’s the £20 note?’ she asked aloud. After eliminating all other possibilities she concluded that she must have dropped it during her recent visit to the loo. The note was never seen again. I said, smiling, ‘your money’s down the pan’. She replied, smiling: ‘and yours will be paying for the bet’, but neither of us smiled when the money trailed in last.
Now we were forlorn - but not our free bus. It stood no longer alone but in a long line of other, presumably ‘free buses’, that had brought from near and far hopeful race-goers. On re-boarding our coach we found,too, that it was no longer like the Marie Celeste: almost every seat was occupied. A selfish but consoling thought crossed my mind: we weren’t alone in losing our shirts.
Following a wee drive, today, January 1st, sees us bringing in the New Year in Kilmarnock – the former home of Johnnie Walker. The resolutions flow as thick and fast as the drink. The weather is unseasonably warm. The company is excellent. But still, we’d rather be in Plumpton - but most of all, we’d rather be in the Dome.
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anubis says...
8:01pm Sun 1 Jan 12
After Oxford, he briefly joined the Times Higher Education Supplement, serving as social science editor, then to the New Statesman, where he became a drinking buddy of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, acquiring a reputation as a ‘fierce leftwinger’, aggressively attacking such targets as Kissinger, the Vietnam war and the Roman Catholic church.
He joined the Labour Party in 1965, but was expelled in 1967, along with a majority of Labour students, over what Hitchens called “prime minister Harold Wilson’s contemptible support for the war in Vietnam”. For a while he wrote as a “correspondent” for International Socialism, journal of the International Socialists (IS) – later to evolve into the ‘Socialist Workers Party’ (at the time I was frequently jointly involved in shared progressive campaigns with these individuals). IS stood apart from the traditional left under the slogan, ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism’.
He soon left IS, joining “a small, but growing, post-Trotskyist sect”, never shy of being arrested/ assaulted on various political protests (see photo of him, in his memoir Hitch-22, being led away by police following an anti-apartheid demo).
Increasingly, he took great pride in advertising himself as ‘detached’ from both sides of the political spectrum, attempting to demolish the reputations of Henry Kissinger, the Clintons, Mother Teresa and Saddam Hussein. He supported the reunification of Ireland and took a ‘pro-life’ stand on abortion, opposed Zionism as “an ethno-nationalist, quasi-religious ideology”, his ‘main enemy’ increasingly becoming religion -- “the main source of hatred in the world, issuer of fatwa and holy bull”. ‘God in NOT Great’ (2007) sold well, but the book lacks the academic status of the many books by Richard Dawkins on similar themes …
His style of his writing changed into that of a cool but cheeky observer committed to certain enlightenment principles, but not committed to parties or movements. The trouble was that he could not maintain this juggling of detachment indefinitely, from the Gulf War (1990) onwards, he began to relate his principles to active people and movements ….. Those of us who think he made the wrong choice - the support of imperialist intervention characterised as “anti-fascism” - are still faced, even in CH’s own ‘fall’ into conservatism, with the question of whether side-taking compromises one’s position as a writer or thinker, eventually, in an unexpected confession of past ‘dishonesty’, in 1979 he admitted he had secretly favoured Thatcher’s Tories. Soon he would more explicitly support the British war with “fascist” Argentina over the Falkland Islands. In 1981 he moved to the United States, to write for The Nation, ‘flagship’ of the US left, where he penned urbane attacks on Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and American foreign policy in South and Central America.
There were arguably many small ‘turning points’ for Hitchens, like the Falklands war. But a major emotional one came in 1989 with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the ambivalent attitude of many on the left towards offending Muslims and non-intervention in the Middle East. Soon after, of course, came the first Gulf War in 1991, when he visited to the Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurds became a symbol to Hitchens, despite evidence of red flags and their abysmal treatment of women, as an ‘existing opposition to tyranny’.
He became a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, writing 10 columns a year. On this gig he was known around Washington as a robust drinker, risky smoker and attender of celebrity parties. Getting to know insiders like Paul Wolfowitz can be justified as getting close to the enemy all the better to expose them. But after 9/11 and on foreign policy this closeness became alignment. His strong advocacy of the war in Iraq gained Hitchens a broader readership, and in September 2005 he was named one of the “top 100 public intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.
He told Rhys Southan of Reason magazine he could no longer say, ‘I am a socialist’. He accused all socialists of ceasing to offer a positive alternative to the capitalist system. Capitalism had indeed for Hitchens become the more revolutionary economic system, and he welcomed globalisation as “innovative and internationalist”. He suggested that this meant he had returned to his early, ‘pre-socialist libertarianism’, having come to attach great value to the freedom of the individual from the state and moral totalitarians -- a familiar terminus for many ex-Marxists – reminiscent of numerous ex-whatevers who find that, once their belief in revolutionary mass change fails, join or support centrist parties, ‘dynamic’ finance houses -- even the Murdoch press! Contrary to legend, it is not the ‘considered revolutionary’, but the ‘romantic rebel’, who goes on to become the conservative, from William Wordsworth onwards.
Pity I missed his ‘Tom Paine’ (2006) performance (where you two were so impressed). Not convinced Tom P (one of my heroes over at least sixty years of my life!) would have shared your enthusiasm for the latest version of Chris Hitchins, on the important questions of 'politics' or 'religion' …. !!