Cambridge Academic Year 1980/1981

Michaelmas Term

The word kept repeating itself. Sacked. I was in my rooms in Bodley’s Court, King’s College, Cambridge. Outside autumn was turning into winter. Sacked. I had a telephone in my hand. Sacked. I had just had a short conversation with Ian Nicol, the legendary Secretary General of the Faculties. Sacked. Nicol did not use the word because it was not only offensive but imprecise. However he did tell me that the General Board of the Faculties had decided not to review the vote of the English Faculty Appointments Committee which had been taken some weeks previously at the beginning of the current Michaelmas term. One item of business before that Appointments Committee was the question of whether I should be appointed to the full lectureship that the English Faculty Board had voted should be created for me at the end of the previous academic year. That vote had been 10-9 for MacCabe. The vote of the Appointments Committee was 4-3 against MacCabe. The three votes in my favour were Frank Kermode, Raymond Williams and the Master of Fitzwilliam who was the chair of this university committee. So alarmed was the Master of Fitzwilliam by the meeting that he went straight to the Secretary General of the Faculties to report his misgivings. So Nicol was not much surprised to find me turning up on his doorstep one or two days later. He was also not much amused with the situation that we found ourselves in. He rarely spoke in anything but guarded bureaucratic terms but he also rarely spoke without giving the strong impression that the English faculty was an incompetent body and the slightly less strong impression that I had been badly and unfairly treated.

However Nicol and his board had just decided that they would not re-open the question of my appointment. For the first time I had to confront the fact that I had been sacked.

I could not sleep. I re-ran my entire professional life since I graduated a decade earlier in 1971.It was one mistake after another. I berated myself with contemptuous violence. The charge was political narcissism. So desperate had I been to avoid the appearance of stomaching the exploitations of capitalism, I had embraced an academic career which promised a political fig leaf as I moved into the professional middle classes.

The voice almost achieved spectral form. It didn’t have the white sheets of the conventional ghost. It was smartly dressed in a suit and tie. It did not meet my gaze but addressed its accusations over my shoulder to an invisible jury. The charge sheet began with my appointment seven years earlier in 1974 as a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. A Fellowship at a Cambridge College had been my only adult ambition. The ambition had been achieved. I was insanely happy. But in 1974 I was also lacerated by the dilemmas of my student past. Was I still a revolutionary? Or was I becoming a member of the ruling class? Was I still a member of the counter culture? Or just another student sell out? These self deluding questions plagued my delight at my academic success. And the plague had consequences.

The first was when I went to see Dr Cramp who was in charge of Fellows’ pension arrangements. Cramp was a lecturer in the Economics faculty but not for him the macro-economics of Keynes or Marx nor the micro-economics of Marshall. He lectured on money, not as theoretical construct, but as firmly empirical tokens. He was also an evangelical Christian who later that year was to resign his Fellowship when Emmanuel voted to admit women as undergraduates. Apparently he considered this as tantamount to turning the college into a brothel. Cramp’s conversation with me was rather more limited. I said that I did not wish to join the contributing pension scheme as I wished to keep myself free of all financial entanglements in the current social system. Cramp begged and pleaded for financial common sense. He even had tears in his eyes. I was obdurate and bid him a cordial farewell.

My current British university pension is £1,000 a year less for this smug arrogance although I should note that I contributed from the next year onwards so my revolutionary pretensions evaporated rather quickly. The mocking voice was jesting at scars that no longer felt any wound.

Another decision I made in the same mood was not so quickly reversed. I joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. This wasn’t a simple individual decision. 1974 is recorded in the history books as the moment that Eurocommunism became a real force in both the French and Italian Communist parties. As well as the British Communist Party, I was joining the French party that I had encountered at the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Italian party whose feasts and festivals I participated in every summer. The British party itself was for me the magazine Marxism Today; edited by Martin Jacques and inspired by Stuart Hall. By 1978 Eurocommunism was dead;The French party retreated into Stalinism, the Italian party collapsed before the violence of the Red Brigades. I left the party in a rage of self recrimination. I had known full well that, equipping myself with a party card, I was banishing America from my future. In 1974 as Nixon escaped a prison cell and Uncle Sam limped towards the exit door in Vietnam, America seemed irrelevant. However, now America was back. The post-Nixon years gave way to Carter and the American universities began to swallow the French world of theory. Part of that swallowing was a vogue for the film magazine Screen on whose editorial board I sat. There were invitations but they were invitations I had to decline for although I had left the Communist party, the very fact that I had been a member rendered me ineligible for an American visa. I had been conscious of the fact that I was giving up America in 1974 but had thought it irrelevant to a life dedicated to the Cambridge English Faculty and Europe. Now the Cambridge English Faculty was totally irrelevant and Europe had shrunk. My student posturing had written America out of my future. Now the ghost’s attack struck home – this wasn’t hypothetical figures about a hypothetical pension, this was a too uncomfortable reality.

But now the tempo increased and the ghost’s contempt cut like a knife. It was 1971. Just graduated I had been offered a contract at the BBC. Instead I had opted to study for a PH.D at Cambridge. I had never considered that the BBC would offer me more money and more job security than life as a graduate student. That indeed was my grievous sin. I had not even thought about such fundamental matters as to what house I could buy or what future financial prospects were promised by the choice presented to me. My imaginary future was entirely dominated by Cambridge and the distant prospect of a College Fellowship. A future which had just come to an end. Sacked

Hanif is a fixture. He’s always been there. I am proud to be his friend.

I first met him in the summer of 1985. At Cannes, Margaret Matheson, my chair at the Production Board, suggested that I employ Sarah Radclyffe—who had just set up the production company Working Title with Tim Bevan—to produce Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. Working Title specialised in making rock videos with star film directors: Nic Roeg, Stephen Frears and others.

Sarah moved from Working Title’s offices to my BFI offices in Rathbone Street, and there was a constant back-and-forth between the two offices, accentuated when Bernard Rose, Working Title’s star director, moved into our basement flat at Alwyne Road. Caravaggio was in pre-production; My Beautiful Launderette was in post. We were the hottest films in town.

My Beautiful Launderette was first out of the gate. It premiered at Edinburgh in the late summer of 1985. I remember the screening with great clarity: early in the morning, with only a handful in the audience. I had one card to play as the new Head of BFI Production: I was going to make the new films about the new society that the mixture of races was brewing in the basement.

By the time the screening was over, I was green with envy. Working Title had shot my fox. I had dreamed of Jamaican London; now we were looking at Pakistan in Bromley, with bisexuality and Thatcherism. And at the helm, a beautiful brown boy, high on cocaine and cracking wonderful jokes. Spitting fire as well.

I remember a note boiling with rage and resentment, accusing me of every kind of political failure. I was so upset that I rang Tim Bevan, to whom I was close at the time, and spilled my pain.

“Don’t worry,” said Tim. “Hanif blows hot and cold.”

We grew up together: films and families, the highs of hits and the lows of failures. We didn’t mix much—apart from anything else, my missus and he did not get on at all. I remember the first time they met and went at each other hammer and tongs: a headmistress and a naughty boy.

Twenty years later, the culmination of this fight came at a dinner party. Hanif’s opening move was to roll a joint and declare that he hated dinner parties. Five minutes later, he finished rolling the joint and left the party. Flavia deemed him persona non grata, and I could hardly demur.

The most memorable of the novels was The Buddha of Suburbia. I was alone in Pittsburgh in 1990 and, unusually, desperately lonely. Matthew Evans of Faber, working his psychic telegram, sent me proofs. I only knew Hanif as a screenwriter, and the novel kept me entertained for a weekend of laughter. “Entertained” doesn’t do it justice. I laughed till I cried. The blues were banished.

From then on, I read every morsel of prose and devoured every scrap of film. Particularly in my memory is a short story that I published in Critical Quarterly, “My Son the Fanatic”. The Satanic Verses brought us a city visible but unseen; “My Son the Fanatic” brought the city to our front door.

Now it was three decades on, and Flavia and I had moved to west London. Every evening, I set out and turned down Shepherd’s Bush Road to the Rouge, where Frears (“Dad”), Hanif and I made up a melancholy threesome, cracking good jokes and savouring great films. Alternatively, I turned north to 72 Ladbroke Road, where Jeremy Thomas summoned his crew. Great years, great times.

And then, in the middle of life, came death: the shattering of a life into quadriplegia, and the struggle to dig a life out of tragedy and a great love, Isabella. A new audience was found and a factory established at Batoum Gardens. And I was dragooned into the factory.

I sent a sketch I wrote on hospitalisation to the threesome: Hanif, Frears and Jeremy Thomas. Hanif ordered me to start a Substack, and a son was provided to teach me the ropes. We were launched.

Dementia. Not a word that I knew when I was young. Occasionally, one would gather from adult conversation that some elderly relative had “gone gaga,” but the information had little impact. However, as one drifted into old age, dementia became a common and terrifying word, as contemporaries disappeared into that abyss where even their very closest loved ones could no longer be recognised.

It is difficult to pinpoint when the symptoms first manifested themselves. At what point does forgetfulness become memory loss? At what point does blocking on a word mutate into aphasia? Certainly, when I went to Pittsburgh in the spring of 2025 to clear out my office of 40 years, as the final act of my retirement, I was not conscious that my brain was closing down. But as the summer began in Italy, my difficulties with memories and words became increasingly evident. I was living in denial, and I tried to mask my state from both myself and others. Perhaps the most obvious symptom was my complete inability to use my computer. This I blamed on the workman’s tools and not the workman.

It was as we prepared to return to England at the beginning of July that denial ran out of road. Family and friends became more and more worried, and my youngest son, Finn, and one of my oldest friends, Ben Lloyd, a doctor, showed me, in as kindly a manner as possible, that I was in dire straits. The terrifying conclusion to this demonstration came when Finn made clear that my computer was functioning perfectly. The dysfunction was mine.

From Italy, we had booked an appointment with my new private GP, and Finn accompanied me to the surgery. He had been with me six months before, when I had signed on with Dr Houghton as I abandoned the medical support system in Pittsburgh. Already worried about dementia, I asked the doctor to give me a cognitive competency test. I passed. Dr Houghton started this second consultation by giving me the test again. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t find the right answers. I couldn’t even understand the questions. I was now in a very bad way, stumbling over every word and with my memory vanishing by the minute. The test wasn’t finished so much as abandoned. Finn, a calm young man, was visibly distraught. The doctor jumped on the phone to tell his assistant that he would have to delay his departure for the summer holiday until later in the afternoon while he found me a hospital.

The Princess Grace Hospital abuts Regent’s Park. Like every private hospital I have entered as a patient or visitor, it gives off a faint odour of money mixed with the faint sound of well-oiled wheels. I was really frightened now. I had often thought of the great linguist Émile Benveniste, silenced in his final years by aphasia. Was that, poor linguist as I was, the fate that was now closing in on me? My internal world had vanished as if on the most terrible of trips. My memory and identity were whirling down a plughole of pitch-black bathwater at an alarming rate. I felt that I was about to whirl down with them.

It was less than two hours since I had entered my Portobello doctor’s surgery. Now, in a hospital room where I sat with Finn and Flavia, a figure of immense authority and knowledge made his entrance: the neurologist for whom we had been waiting. He was tall and immaculately dressed. He had drawings of a family on a beach that I was required to interpret; then he quizzed all three of us. He pronounced early on that I would not be able to drink again. It can serve as an index of my fear that I acquiesced in this injunction immediately and wholeheartedly.

Then Flavia and Finn left. Later, they told me that they had gone to a Chinese restaurant, where they discussed what kind of homes were available for human vegetables. Back in the hospital, already somewhat recovered and with a drip pumping me full of vitamin B, I settled down, without a drink in my hand, to contemplate a future without alcohol. I found the proposal surprisingly undaunting. In recent years, my pleasure in and consumption of wine had declined markedly. Strangely important in this internal debate was the fact that my most pleasurable drink had already been snatched from me. When in Italy, I would, before lunch, drive into a local bar and inhale a double gin and tonic to get the day started. At the beginning of the year, Meloni’s Fascist government had introduced a draconian drink-driving law, which meant I could no longer enjoy this treasured pleasure. The first step had already been taken.

As I was drifting off to sleep with happy thoughts of abstention, my room was suddenly invaded by a squad of nurses who hauled me out of bed to check my vital signs. The fear which had subsided was now replaced by a wave of anger—a wave which was redoubled in force when, an hour later, and as I once again drifted into sleep, the invasion was repeated. This time, I remonstrated strongly with the nurses, none of whom had a firm command of English. I learned that my heartbeat was dangerously low—so low that I was in imminent danger of death; indeed, I might be dead already. The doctors had ordered that my heart must be checked every hour. I wedged a chair against the door to prevent further interruptions, but managed only a fitful sleep, fearful of hourly invasions that did not materialise.

I awoke with one nightmare banished—my speech was fluent and my memory a limpid pool which delivered its secrets on request—but another presented itself almost as intensely. No one wished to talk about what had brought me to hospital. All they were concerned with was my heart—the unanimous opinion was that it had reached its sell-by date. This was despite the fact that I had no symptoms and that my annual check-up in Pittsburgh, focused on the heart, had always given me a clean bill of health. The problem wasn’t just my heart, but finding a hospital to fit the pacemaker that was the simple solution to my near-death state. There was no bed open at Bart’s, the national centre for pacemakers, and it was decided—not by me—that I would move first to University College Hospital, awaiting an opening in the hospital of my childhood.

Getting from the Princess Grace to UCH was a great adventure. The ambulance was equipped with two likely lads, one from Poland, the other a native South Londoner of Caribbean heritage. Euston Road swam into a completely new perspective as we made the short journey to UCH and then dived into the bowels of a world where patients were admitted from other hospitals in a complicated exchange system which bore the surface appearance of an Eastern Europe that has vanished from history. These exchanges were conducted by our Polish friend, and it took half an hour of his secret negotiations to guarantee our transfer from the ruinously expensive private healthcare system to the NHS, into which I had long poured my taxes.

When the paperwork for the transfer had been completed, my bed was still not ready, and so I remained in the secret grotto that I had just discovered. This secret grotto also housed a pharmacist’s wet dream: a chemist overflowing with medicines, which supplied both the main and satellite hospitals of UCH. It was bossed by a friendly and intelligent woman whose roots traced back to the Indian subcontinent through East Africa. While I was parked there awaiting my bed, we talked, mainly of her love for London, as I was assessed and registered by a doctor of East Asian origins who spoke with an impeccable public-school accent.

Then, finally, I was wheeled to my newly vacated bed. This was no longer in a private room, but in a very large space divided into four-bed sections. Before he left, Finn told the strikingly beautiful matron, who was of Caribbean heritage, that I needed to be left quietly alone. Exhausted by the excitement of travelling through London in an ambulance, I looked forward to a moment of peace and quiet and composed myself for sleep. No sooner had I dropped off than a gang of women patients, in a state of great agitation, erupted from nowhere, surrounded my bed and, in ever more dramatic tones, implored me not to go to sleep because, if I did, I would be sure to die. More angry than afraid, I hauled myself and my drip of vitamins to find the matron and asked if she could stop fellow patients from harassing me.

If I had expected a sympathetic ear, what I got was a hostile stare. “You are acting in an entitled and privileged manner,” she said. Actually, my memory does not retain her exact words, but they were drawn from that lexicon which merges the bureaucratic and the politically correct, and which has dominated institutional speech since the Blair administrations. She went on, and now I do remember the exact words: “We are a community here, and your fellow patients were concerned about your health. You are refusing to join our community, and you are selfish.” If I had been anticipating hearing the warm and friendly speech rhythms of Jamaica, I was even more disappointed than I had been by the hostile stare. The matron spoke with the typical whining and aggrieved accent of a native Londoner. Later, I reflected that I was experiencing the fully justified class hatred with which NHS workers regarded patients decanted from a private system which can furnish private beds but relies on the safety blanket of the NHS for anything it cannot provide. At the time, I slunk back to my bed with my tail between my legs.

When at the Princess Grace, I had phoned my daughter, Johanna, and begged her to come to my side. She came at once and provided a vivid presence, darting about the ward, engaging every doctor and nurse she could in conversation, gleaning information all the time. When she arrived at UCH after my humiliating and noisy night, I told her that I was in extremis and that I had to get out. Once again, she went off on her whirling dervish dance, striking an instant rapport with all she encountered on her rounds of this new institution. Her amazing persistence paid off. By late in the day, it looked as though I would have to spend another night in my community because my case did not justify the blue-light ambulance that was needed to take me to Bart’s. At that point, she was alerted by a nurse that the relevant consultant was about to come out of a meeting. She doorstepped the consultant as he exited his meeting, and a blue-light ambulance was summoned.

Once again, my spirits soared as I took another ambulance ride. Bart’s had been the hospital of my City of London childhood, and I remembered visits to its accident department. It was also the hospital where my father had died in my arms. This trip was not a hop along the Euston Road, but a two-mile drive from the West End to the western edge of the City. Once again, I marvelled at how much travelled streets were completely transformed from the perspective of an ambulance.

When we arrived, the Victorian hospital of my memory had completely vanished. In its place was a futuristic glass-and-steel building which took my breath away. Here, there were no preliminary paper formalities, and I was wheeled into a private room. A young Scottish nurse explained that I was unlikely to have the operation immediately, as her team had been working at their very limit all day and she was not willing to let them go back into surgery until they had recuperated overnight. She spoke as a trainer of elite athletes, carefully analysing what efforts they could be asked to undertake and when their limits had been reached.

In fact, it was only after a further day that my op was finally scheduled, and I spent the time in glorious isolation, using this first moment of peace to try and grasp what was happening. One thing was clear: when I was admitted to the Princess Grace Hospital in a state of radical cognitive impairment, I was suffering neither from dementia nor from some side effect of my manic depression. No doctor or nurse in the five days I had been in hospital care had mentioned dementia or bipolar affective disorder. Instead, I had been told that my mental collapse had been caused by alcohol and, before I had time to absorb this completely unspecific diagnosis, it had been discovered that I was on the verge of death from a failing heart.

One of the doctors who periodically flitted by my bed mentioned that the failing heart may have been a contributing factor in my mental collapse. However, before I could interrogate him, he, like all the other doctors, flitted off. Their unwillingness to engage me in conversation was probably due to overwork, but it may also have been due to doctors’ general unwillingness to admit any ignorance. It is a condition of contemporary medicine that doctors know best, and this belief sustains not only the patients but the doctors—poor eejits that they are. In my case, what the doctors could not explain and were unwilling to discuss was that, apart from my heart rate, there were no other symptoms of heart failure.

An amusing trace of this anxiety of ignorance appeared in the notes on my case, where the lack of any symptoms was concluded by a sentence: “He denies feeling dizzy.” Thus, finally, a symptom is located in the diagnostic wilderness. Except I did not deny feeling dizzy; I did not feel dizzy. But if doctors reveal weakness in their belief in their discipline’s omniscience, they demonstrate their incredible strength in the miracles they perform daily. After two days of waiting, I was wheeled to an operating room and, after a battery was folded into my body, an electrical lead was threaded down an artery to my heart. A small electrical charge would now stimulate my heart to beat 60 times a minute instead of the 20 or 30—going as low as six—that registered on all the monitors. Unfortunately, I could see nothing of this operation because I had a cone placed on my head which forced me to look up and out, not back and down. However, I could feel the extraordinary level of concentration which surgeon, anaesthetist and nurse were focusing on my body. By now convinced that the evidence of the monitors overrode any minor anomalies, I was delighted and thankful that I was being saved from imminent death.

Returned home, it became clear that all the signs of cognitive impairment had evaporated. Except one: I was completely innumerate. I could not perform the simplest mental arithmetic, and all dates had disappeared. I could not summon the right figures for events as disparate as the end of the Second World War or Finn’s birthday. It was two weeks after leaving Bart’s before we saw our neurologist again and shifted the focus of medical science from my heart back to my brain. I had discovered through Google that Dr Thomas Britton—the neurologist’s name—was a very eminent figure both nationally and internationally. I had a lot of questions for him, but he had only one message for me: “Not a drop. Not a sip. Not a glass.” Every time I thought that he had run out of ways to tell me to abstain, he would find another figure of speech to drive home the inevitability of another, and perhaps fatal, collapse.

I had not drunk a drop since my first meeting with Dr Britton, and I had no intention of starting again, but I found his diagnosis slightly puzzling given that my intake of alcohol had reduced over the last five years. My children, who had witnessed this reduction, were particularly concerned that there was some other cause which still needed identifying. I didn’t dare question Dr Britton myself, but at the end of the session Finn said, “That’s not a convincing diagnosis; there must be other underlying causes.” The Great Neurologist examined his glasses closely. “I have a symptom and I have a cure; I don’t need to start diving down rabbit holes.”

And so we returned to our daily round. I was reminded of these astonishing events when I talked to Finn because he started every conversation with a mental-arithmetic test and a set of events to be dated. I was as hopeless as ever. Then, about a week after our second meeting with Dr Britton, Flavia, most unusually, came up with a test: “What’s 60 minus 49?” I swear that I felt the tumbler locks fall into place in the fruit machine of my brain. Everything lined up. “Eleven,” I said. We quickly established that not only had arithmetical ability come back to me, but the dates that had eluded me were now once again in place. Flavia’s delight was very visible. She had had a terrible time not only dealing with my descent into mumbling idiocy but also with my fear and loathing of hospitals. If that wasn’t enough, she had to negotiate the bills that now came flying in. Worst of all was the period when she had thought that she would spend an indefinite future with a husband who had turned into a vegetable.

Indeed, I had been in a parlous state when I entered the Princess Grace Hospital. I celebrated at a dinner with Ben Lloyd, the doctor who had first diagnosed the danger I was in. Ben did not disagree with the general speculation that, had the pacemaker not been fitted, I would, in the coming months, have died in my sleep of heart failure. Ben also thought that I had experienced an even closer shave with my brain. I had been days, if not hours, away from permanent brain damage when I entered my first hospital.

Ben, however, as he was always the first to point out, was a paediatrician, not a neurologist or a cardiologist. My heart had been given a clean bill of health by Bart’s, but for my brain the most important judgment was Dr Britton’s. Our final consultation took place a mere two months after I had first met him, when babbling. He pronounced a “remarkable recovery,” signed me off and said that, from a neurological perspective, I could drive again. Most of the session was spent with me asking questions. Unlike most doctors, he did not claim to be omniscient. “We know very little about the brain,” he said. But unlike most doctors, he was completely convincing.

I treated myself to a taxi home and reflected that, at 76, being offered a new heart and a new brain was being offered a new lease of life. However, at 76, the lease would be short.

In his memoir Hitch 22 Christopher Hitchens tells of his first meeting with James Fenton, a meeting to decide whether they would share a house in their final year as undergraduates. The great poet’s opening gambit was to ask Hitchens whether he knew that he was the second most famous person in Oxford. Although I had pursued my studies at Cambridge, I spent a great deal of my time in Oxford that complemented the intellectual delights of the Fens with more hedonistic pursuits. So it is no surprise that I knew exactly who Hitchens was. He was famous for his flaunted bi-sexuality (I first heard his name in conjunction with a particularly adventurous threesome) and for his extreme left politics. However, the only time that I encountered Christopher as a student was in the gent’s toilet of the Oxford Union. I have no idea why I was there as it is the only time I ever set foot in the Union so I assume that I found myself caught short and made for the nearest urinal. As I prepared to leave, the lavatory was invaded by a posse of young blades in dinner jackets dancing attendance on a figure who they all evidently worshipped. I don’t know how I knew that the centre of attention was Hitchens but I could see that his admiring companions, who gathered round as he relieved himself, hung on his every word. This encounter left me with a highly ambivalent attitude to the second most famous man in Oxford. I could see that here was a real star but I also realized that I was outside his charmed circle and anyway I regarded the Union, as all such venerable institutions at both universities, as beneath contempt.

My ambivalent attitude became more pronounced when Christopher pulled off a coup which had me boiling with envy, the only genuine academic emotion. 1970 was the centenary of the Paris Commune and Christopher had come across a collection of Marx’s writings on the Commune. The collection was out of copyright so Christopher slapped his name on it and had, at the tender age of 21, a book to his credit. More galling still his fame had spread to London, where he had landed the glittering prize of a job at the New Statesman. Even worse one could not open a copy of Private Eye without coming across references to Christopher ‘Robin’ Hitchens.

It was therefore with mixed feelings that in the autumn of 1973 I accepted my friend James Pettifer’s invitation to attend a Marxist discussion group at which the great man would be present. The group met in an insalubrious Irish pub called Wards which Christopher memorably described as a “drain off Piccadilly Circus”, for one had to descend into the bowels of the earth to access the delights of the establishment. It may seem strange now that young men with the world before them should choose to spend an evening discussing Marx but we were all soixante huitards. Our first year in university had witnessed the French student uprising of May 1968 and it was that date which was used to identify our generation. However the dating was too precise and too narrow. Our schooldays had been punctuated by world wide political ferment. The Cuban revolution, the American Civil Rights movement, the Cultural Revolution in China were the back beat to our adolescence. Even more important the Paris events of 68 were only one of the political moments of that year. For many the Prague Spring with its promise of revolution in the Soviet bloc was more important. For anyone of Irish descent the growth of the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement and the Bogside march of October 1968 were as significant as the evenements in Paris. Dwarfing all these for students of our generation, and affecting many for whom the other political events were tangential, was the Vietnam war.

London is a very large city but our blossoming friendship was blessed by geography. Christopher was working for the New Statesman on High Holborn and I was working at Screen’s offices hard by in Soho. It was easy to meet for a drink or lunch. Our favourite restaurant was an Indian in Gerard Street called The Ganges. You can tell how long ago this was by the fact that by the late seventies Gerard Street had become Chinatown and all the restaurants were Chinese. But in 1973 there was only one Chinese restaurant there – the Lee How Fook – and good as that was it was not as good as The Ganges which was also considerably cheaper. Christopher would arrive looking somewhat dishevelled, his style, which he maintained to the end of his days, was based around a tie (then more than now the symbol of the ruling class) with its knot tied so low it was almost at his then still washboard stomach. There would be a political briefing with the Bangladeshi or Cypriot waiters as Christopher kept up to speed with world events. Before the briefing, in fact before anything else, drinks would be ordered. In those days a bottle of wine was obligatory at lunch, if it was a friend two, if it was Christopher you could go on counting. Christopher was beautiful in those days but physical beauty was merely a small element in his extraordinary attractiveness – he may have been the most attractive man I ever met. And that attractiveness survived his physical dissolution into paunch and jowls as all those lunches caught up with him and remained undimmed as he became the buddha like figure who confronted so bravely his own death. It was above all his relation to language which charmed and much of that charm has been left in his voluminous writings but only those who knew the pleasure of his company (and we are legion) or who have consulted him on youtube (more legions) have experienced his extraordinary control of his voice as a method of instruction and seduction. His use of the pause was masterful in keeping your attention, his variation of volume and timbre had you on the edge of your seat. He rarely used direct mimicry but he did swoop in and out of character as he told his stories from contemporary politics and from the history of the left. And the seduction and instruction was not confined to politics. There was also time for gossip and always one or two unrepeatably funny dirty jokes.

London geography smiled on us at work but it positively beamed on us at home. We both had just moved into Islington with our girlfriends and lived 200 yards apart on streets just off Offord Road. So it was easy to lure Christopher to our kitchen. But that was probably as much to do with Flavia as me. Flavia was a world class cook but even more important Christopher had a world class crush on her. So his invitation to spend a week in Portugal at the beginning of March 1975 was directed as much to her as to me. Christopher had the great problem that he was a foreign correspondent without a budget. This caused him real distress about Vietnam, the political story of our time. He ached to cover it but there was no money available. To make things worse James Fenton, his best friend, was covering it. The New Statesman was no more able to fund Fenton than Hitchens but history had provided Fenton with a fairy godmother who arrived at the New Statesman offices with a suitcase full of used fivers which she wanted to devote to the good old cause, in this case keeping up the supply of Fenton copy from Saigon and Pnomh Penh.

Christopher’s acute predicament was that when he proposed a foreign assignment he also had to supply a fantastic bucket shop deal. He thus spent a great deal of time scanning the small ads and tourist literature. One night in Ward’s as the group broke up he told me he had found El Dorado. Because of the revolution in Portugal the tourist market had collapsed and for £30 you could get a flight and a week in the Avenida Palace in Lisbon. “Why don’t you and the flame haired temptress join me”. In the taxi between Piccadilly Circus and Islington, I marshalled my arguments to convince Flavia that we could leave our one year old son Fergus for a week with Annie the au pair. But I didn’t need them. I hadn’t got further than “Christopher invited us” before Flavia said “I’m in”.

At that time I had a serious phobia about flying and Flavia helpfully informed Christopher of this as we took off from London. Hitchens was a savage tease and he roasted me all the way to Lisbon which made an uncomfortable start to a memorable week. Once on the ground I was caught up in the throes of a revolution led by an army which had sickened of its role of maintaining colonial rule in Portugal’s African colonies. The excitement of a country waking up after fifty years of fascist separation from the modern world was epitomised in my favourite political poster of that moment. A couple of peasants are standing at the door of their cottage chatting to an army officer who is introducing them to a long line of guests beginning with Freud, Marx and Einstein and ending with Charlie Chaplin. Each day I would set out from our smart hotel and cross the Tagus to the factories where the Communist Party had their most important industrial base. I had an entrée into this world because I was filing a report for the Morning Star, the newspaper of the British Communist Party. Each day was spent in long discussion about the balance of political forces in the run up to the elections to the constituent assembly. Finally as day waned I would cross the Tagus back to Lisbon and meet up with Christopher and Flavia in the bar of the Hilton hotel where all, and I mean all, the foreign correspondents could be found. The vast majority appeared to have never set foot outside the hotel since they arrived. Their time was spent in the bar with other hacks drinking and gossiping. About once every half hour someone was deputed to ring up Reuters to find out if anything had happened. It was like an offcut from Evelyn Waugh’s classic Scoop which I suddenly realized was not a satire but a work of savage realism.

But I was to learn more about journalism before the week was up. It wasn’t only excitement that was in the air in that March of 1975. There was fear and the constant crackle of danger. Earlier that month General Spinola, the figurehead of the original revolution had tried to mount a right wing coup and now the communist and socialist parties were circling each other like dire enemies. In order to face down the communists Mario Soares, the leader of the socialist party had called a mass rally of his supporters at the Bull Ring and there were rumours that the communists or one of the leftist groupuscules would engage violently with this demonstration. As we got closer and closer to the Bull Ring I got more and more frightened. The huge crowds and the sea of red flags seemed a prelude to some serious street fighting. I felt rather like I had when we took off from London less than a week before with the difference that then I could use reason to assuage my fears, now reason told me I was correct in being terrified. I couldn’t tell Flavia of my emotions because she would only tell Christopher and the subsequent teasing would be unbearable. As we got closer and closer to the Bull Ring and as I shrank with fear, Hitchens began to swell with excitement. The day before he had eaten a prawn that was past its sell by date and it had, for 24 hours, been a rather muted Christopher. But now the poisoned gamba was forgotten, the volume was being turned up and he was positively skipping as he walked. In fact my fears proved groundless but that may have been because the socialists turned out in such numbers that nobody dared take them on. The Bull Ring had opera like boxes and our box was one along from Soares who delivered a fiery speech warning the communists against turning their back on democracy. Soares was surrounded by muscle and it was clear that you could not access his box from the corridor. Christopher, however, was determined to get a quote and as Soares finished speaking he climbed on the rail of our box and launched himself at our neighbour. In my memory the leap was huge and a fall would have been fatal. What is certain is that it was not a risk that I would ever have taken and that Christopher got his quote.

The opening scene of the film The Killing Fields focuses on a table at which a group of men are talking and drinking. Suddenly a bomb goes off uncomfortably close and the men all jump to their feet. Half rush away from bomb, half run towards it. The half that run towards the bomb are the journalists and I often think of this striking scene as providing a great image of why Christopher identified so strongly as a journalist. He wanted to rush towards danger. This elemental desire was often satisfied by journalism but he could find danger at home too. Sometime in the late eighties Christopher and I were mincing along Christopher Street the epicentre of gay life in Manhattan. Why we were there I have absolutely no idea but it was late and we had, as the Irish say, ‘drink taken’. A car with four Jersey boys who had crossed the tunnel for some gay baiting drew up. They informed us at the top of their voices that they hoped all of us faggots died of Aids. No sooner had they drawn away from us then Christopher was sprinting in pursuit. I lumbered after him hardly understanding what had happened and with no idea at all of what Christopher planned. A red light had halted the car from which the insults had come and we reached it before it could pull away. To my growing amazement and consternation Christopher yanked open the door and invited the car’s inhabitants to withdraw their remarks. Four Hoboken youths (possibly armed) against two fat Englishman. They folded at once and mumbled apologies. It was only after they had drawn away that I realized what had just happened and the risks that Christopher had run without a thought. It is well to remember that Christopher’s father was a naval commander who had seen service in the Second World War. Courage was an obvious virtue from an early age.

And so we came back to Offord Road from Portugal bearing memories and stories. Christopher’s favourite was his account of one of the walks that he and Flavia had taken while I was communing with the proletariat. In a very beautiful garden they had encountered a peacock who had exhibited his tail in a full masculine display. “I knew just how that peacock felt”, was the punchline to this Hitchens story. Years later, when we briefly shared a house in Pittsburgh, he told me that he had made a pass at Flavia on this particular outing. When I conveyed this information to Flavia, she said “so that’s what he was doing”.

All good things come to an end and the Offord Road idyll was no exception. First Christopher left his girlfriend Anita Bennet and Islington. Anita was a very attractive blonde American women who Christopher nicknamed The Otter in tribute to her sinuous form. She was a Trot too but a slightly more serious one. She had been heavily involved in the anti-war movement in the States and had got out one step ahead of the FBI. Her political commitment was instinctive and she was delusionally optimistic. I remember her coming up with Christopher to dine on high table at Emmanuel College where I was now a research fellow and telling me that she thought my colleagues presented fertile ground for recruitment. I adored her and when the completely unexpected blow fell, Flavia and I harboured her in our house. I have rarely seen a human being in such pain.

Christopher was no longer round the corner and then Flavia and I were no longer in London. I had left the idyll of my research fellowship at Emmanuel College for a faculty lectureship in the history of Early Modern and Modern English in relation to literature. Writing your first set of lectures is a daunting task. When some of the subjects you are lecturing on require learning from scratch, the task could seem positively life threatening. What was certain was that we would all (Flavia, Fergus and the newly arrived Johanna ) have to live in Cambridge and that I would do nothing but work from break of day to dead of night for over two years. One of our few breathers from this rather secluded existence came in the form of a weekend visit from Christopher and his new girlfriend Eleni Meleagru. I decided to take my first weekend off in over a year, Flavia set out to forage in the supermarkets and off licences of Cambridge and the children were told they better behave themselves. It has to be said that at this stage of his existence Christopher was not very child friendly. When I tried to sing the joys of fatherhood, he appealed to the physical awfulness of babies and in particular their disgusting lavatorial habits. The children were looking particularly appealing as Christopher arrived but no sooner had they greeted him than they disappeared upstairs. When, disturbed by their long absence, I went to look for them I found them in the guest bedroom smearing the walls with excrement. It should be said that this was not typical behaviour and was never repeated. I sometimes surmise that Fergus and Johanna had intuited Hitchens’s negative views about them and had decided to get their retaliation in first, but I fear that happenstance is a more likely explanation.

Well it certainly broke the ice and got the weekend off to a memorable start. Christopher was now spending as much of his time as possible in the Eastern Mediterranean, obsessed by the partition of Cyprus, a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, and discovering for himself the tragedy of the Kurdish history. Eleni was a striking Cypriot beauty, dark and olive skinned. She was also very slim and boyish, so slim and boyish that while enjoying a kiss with Christopher outside Lancaster Gate station they had been interrupted by a member of Her Majesty’s constabulary who thought they were both men and committing a public nuisance. Eleni was both very clever and very opinionated and we were soon embroiled in arguments about the use of physical force. Eleni took a very robust view of the armed struggle, so robust that Christopher’s nickname for her was “the terrorist”. She also took a very robust view of cannabis which was a great relief to me because it meant that I could light up a succession of joints without paying any attention to Christopher’s disapproval. Christopher, most unusually for our generation, hadn’t even dabbled in psychedelics and he had an extremely negative view of cannabis. This was in some way licensed by a left opinion that judged drugs a ‘’petit bourgeois irrelevance” which also left one open to police detention. But Christopher’s objection was more visceral. He really had nothing of the hippy about him and in many ways belonged more to the thirties than the sixties. Indeed for all his political radicalism and sexual subversion, there was also a very straight side to Christopher. This first surfaced politically in the early eighties when almost alone amongst our friends, he supported Margaret Thatcher’s expedition to retake the Falkland Islands from the Argentinian junta but it was there as a back beat from the very start and was most evident in his conservative taste in literature

Because of my job in Cambridge I did not see much of Christopher at the end of the seventies but I had the very strong impression that he had lost his way. The political commitment to the International Socialists which had been central to his life since his school days had evaporated and if he still styled himself a revolutionary socialist, this was an increasingly verbal gesture. He had left the New Statesman to become a foreign correspondent for the Daily Express but his one experience of mainstream Fleet Street was a very unpleasant one and within a year he was back at the Staggers imbroiled in its increasingly arcane internal politics. He and Eleni also began to succumb to the country house weekend where Christopher would take the role of the court jester singing rather ignominiously for his supper. I was therefore in two minds when he told me that he was moving to the States to work for the Nation. On the one hand I was devastated that he was leaving London to which Flavia and I and the children had returned but, on the other, he had clearly run out of road in England.

Before they left Christopher and Eleni came round for dinner and not surprisingly a great deal of wine was consumed. Flavia firmly announced that she was going to have to teach tomorrow and she was going to bed before she drank so much that she would be incapable of fulfilling her duties. The last time we had entertained Christopher had been a particular riotous occasion. Christopher and the cartoonist Posy Simmons, another guest, discovered that they both had memorized an apparently inexhaustible number of limericks and they traded rhymes for what seemed hours. How many of the 300 or so limericks that were hurled into the fray were memorized and how many were produced on the spot I cannot say but I do know that, for the first and only time in my life, I awoke the next day feeling as though my chest had taken a savage beating and slowly realized that I had laughed so vigourously that I had bruised my ribs. Flavia is famous for her hard head but that morning when she got to school her hangover was so disabling that a colleague urged her to go home immediately. In three decades of teaching this was the only occasion that Flavia took time off.

She was not about to repeat the experience and, as she headed to bed, Christopher Eleni and I decanted ourselves from the dining table into the sitting room. I started plying Eleni with joints and began some mild fooling around. Christopher meanwhile, with his back to us, was rifling through my Dylan collection and singing along with his favourite songs oblivious to anything else. It must be said that Dylan was Christopher’s one concession to the hippies. He knew all his songs by heart and if an evening didn’t end with some Auden it ended with Dylan. Many years later, in Pittsburgh, Christopher told me that far from being zoned out to Dylan he had been carefully observing Eleni and me on the sofa in a mirror. That image of dispassionate observation captures something essential to Christopher. Christopher ‘cast a cold eye on life on death’ (as Yeats urged) but that eye was committed to seeing what happened next; to recording his experience.

In 1985 I landed perhaps the most glittering of academic prizes, a one semester appointment at an American research university. Pittsburgh both city and university were in the throes of a massive transformation when I was appointed. For a century Pittsburgh had been the major steel producer in the world but in the late 1970s the entire industry collapsed with the loss of some 100,000 well paid jobs. The city council, the chamber of commerce and the university had come up with a plan to regenerate the city– entitled Renaissance – in which the universities and the hospitals would replace the steel mills as the economic engine of the city. My appointment took place in this context and I was expected to use my contacts to raise Pittsburgh’s profile. Indeed the university provided me a budget to bring visiting speakers to campus. The first speaker that I invited was Christopher. And I invited him at least once a year for the next ten years. My friends became his friends and when in his final year he was made the visiting Andrew W. Mellon Professor, his first academic appointment, he knew the dive bars of the city better than I did and was a well established honorary member of the Pitt English department .

My first memory of Hitchens in Pittsburgh is a matter of some shame. We were having lunch and later in the day I would introduce Christopher’s talk. In between times I had to teach my graduate seminar but as the time for teaching approached I realized that I was too drunk to teach and there was not enough time left to sober up. I was in a real state which bought out the worst in Christopher. “There’s only one solution” he said as he grabbed a passing waiter by the arm “Another bottle, please”. I taught drunk although I have to report that the class was particularly animated and nobody seemed to notice my pitiful state. I did make a vow, which I have not yet broken, never to teach drunk again. I also wondered if Christopher with his over developed sense of mischief had plied me with wine at the beginning of the lunch in order to precipitate the crisis which he had solved in such a dangerous and magisterial manner.

Certainly Christopher had no compunction in teaching or speaking with enough drink taken to make most of us mumbling repetitive bores. However Christopher, in any normal sense of the word, never got drunk There is no doubt that Christopher drank a lot, drank more even than his Fleet Street contemporaries. Edward Said described his intake as ‘gargantuan’ and that seems a fair assessment. My first realization that Christopher was not as other drinkers came early in our friendship when we were sauntering down Offord Road and into work at about eleven o’clock in the morning. Suddenly Christopher said “hang on a minute” and dived into a bar we were passing. By the time I realized what he was doing he had a Bloody Mary already ordered which he downed in one and then we continued our stroll. However to describe him as an alcoholic is extremely misleading. Of course alcoholic is a misleading term in itself, coined in the 1840s as part of the long nineteenth century medicalization of the body, it reduces an enormous range of behaviours to a single model. It also implies someone who cannot take responsibility for their own life. Christopher did not ressemble the model of an alcoholic at all, apart from his prodigious intake of wines and spirits, and he took full responsibility for his own life. The truth is that when we manage a more complex analysis of alcoholism, Christopher may turn out to be an example of a rare form of addiction which mixes alcohol and creativity productively. Certainly he did not, when drunk, become a maudlin and repetitive bore. If anything drink made him even less sentimental and even sharper verbally.

Another incident from Pittsburgh that comes to mind from that period stresses the complicated role that alcohol played in his intellectual life. An eminent Cambridge academic was giving a talk on Raymond Williams. Williams was one of Christopher’s bugbears, he found formulations like “structure of feeling’’ unbelievably wooly and scorned Raymond’s Long Revolution as the epitome of reformist confusion. If Christopher started the seminar in a sour frame of mind, very shortly he had positively curdled. The speaker delivered one of the worst talks I have ever heard. It was in the form of a hagiography, but a hagiography with had no content except piety. Raymond was praised in the most extravagant but the most vacuous of terms. As the speaker droned through his meaningless praise, I could see that Christopher was readying himself for battle. He had been drinking all afternoon but when he came to address the speaker there were no hesitations or stumbles. There was, however, a studied but aggressive contempt for the paper we were meant to be considering. The vacuous arguments were remorselessly dissected, the hagiography was dismissed for the pious nonsense it was. The speaker was left speechless. As he visibly had no resources with which to reply to the coruscating arguments he contented himself with the pathetic claim that he never replied to political provocations. The rest of the seminar passed in the most uncomfortable atmosphere that I can ever remember in a university. Two days later I received a furious letter from the speaker which ended with the hope that “you will roll in the gutter with your drunken friend Hitchens.” This example is a particularly good one because there is no doubt that Christopher would not have spoken as he did if he had not been drinking but his argument could not have been clearer nor better expressed. Interestingly when, much later, a Pittsburgh colleague asked Christopher why he drank so much, the reply was “For courage”.

Over many decades I only twice saw him the ‘worse for drink’. The first time was at the Hay Literary festival when I interviewed him for an afternoon session when he kept on spilling his drink and slurring his words. But even this slightly shameful performance had something of the ’stage Christopher’ about it. The second occasion was shortly before he died. He was very exercised by the row which had caused him to break with our old friend Edward Said and he kept repeating, like any saloon bar drunk, “I will not be called a racist”. Against these two examples, there are hundreds of occasions when the more he drank the more accurate and more wide ranging became his quotations from the canon of English poetry, the more astonishing became his range of historical memory and the more impressive became his grasp of logic. A further curiosity of Christopher’s relation to alcohol was that as one finished another punishing session at a very late hour, Christopher did not slink off to bed but retired to his study to emerge the next morning with 2,000 impeccably composed words. Like Shakespeare he ‘never blotted out line’, his sentences unreeling without any hesitation or correction.

My youngest son Finn recently asked me whether Christopher would have written more or better if he had not drank. The question underestimates the extent to which alcohol was woven into Christopher’s writing. It would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that Christopher never stopped working, the books and the newspapers that were ransacked while drinking were spliced into the conversations that alcohol generated. However, it should be said that when Christopher went to America in his early thirties many might have said that he had frittered away his talents. In those early days he was a by word for sloppy journalism and although he deeply resented this reputation, it was part of his London years. Indeed Christopher tacitly acknowledged the problem by including very few articles from the seventies in his numerous collections of essays. I must confess that much as I admired Christopher’s writing and his extraordinary historical knowledge, I didn’t take him seriously as a thinker until I began reading his journalism in America when I arrived at the beginning of 1985. Christopher’s encounter with literary New York in the 1980s was particularly fruitful both for Christopher and, indeed, for New York. One may hope that a future biographer may map out this encounter in fine detail but it is certain that that both Ben Sonnenfeld and his magazine Grand Street and Steve Wasserman in a variety of roles as editor and agent will be a significant part of the story.

In his first few visits to Pittsburgh Christopher talked about contemporary politics. The work was now much less slapdash and much more informed than the London journalism but there was little to indicate that Christopher was anything but a political journalist who wrote particularly well. And then in 1987 he proposed a different kind of talk, “Blood Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies”. I can still remember the thrill of that talk, one of the very best lectures that I have ever attended. Christopher’s topic was the ‘’special relationship” between England and America which Christopher understood not as a narrow political topic but as the complicated relation between two cultures as the British lost an empire and the Americans, with some ambivalence, gained one. Central to the lecture and perhaps the single best chapter in his subsequent book reflected on Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’. There is no phrase of Kipling’s that is so well known. Indeed, it summarizes the rejection of Kipling as an outdated imperialist. Hitchens in a masterly reading of the poem and its contexts demonstrates that the poem is indeed imperialist but there are two empires at play in the poem which is written to commemorate a very specific date. The United States had just defeated the Spanish navy and the poem urges America to take over the colonial administration of the Philippines. This political point is made evident in the poem’s place and date of first publication: The New York Sun on 5^th February 1899, the day before the US Senate voted to accede to President McKinley’s request and take the Philippines into American protection. To make the point even more strongly the first reader to whom Kipling sent his poem was Teddy Roosevelt, the most enthusiastic of American imperialists. The poem envisages the United States taking its share of the imperial burden and adding to the British Empire, which had dominated the globe since the defeat of Napoleon, an American Empire similarly dedicated to shouldering the White Man’s Burden. This play between two empires, one ascendant and one in decline is the theme of Hitchens’s book. In a masterful conjunction of literary analysis and political history he makes clear how multi-faceted and how important ‘the special relationship’ is to understand the history of the twentieth century.

I was truly staggered by both the lecture and the subsequent book because although I had noticed a very marked improvement in Christopher’s writing I had put this down to the beneficial influence of American editing and fact checking. Blood, Class and Nostalgia however wasn’t just an improvement, it was an astonishing change of gear in which Christopher left behind his juvenile Trotskyism in favour of a wide sweep of cultural analysis in which politics was simply one element. There can be little doubt that an important factor in this transformation was Christopher’s ever more crucial identification as an American and that there is no doubt that the special relationship has an important allegorical reading in terms of Hitchens’s autobiography.

If autobiography is a grace note in Blood, Class and Nostalgia, it is the major focus of what is arguably the greatest of Hitchens’s essays and what is unarguably one of the greatest essays written in English in my lifetime. “Prepared for the Worst” provided the title for his first collection of essays published in 1988 but it is also the title of the closing essay in that book in which Hitchens recounts discovering, as he neared forty, that his mother had been born a Jew. The essay is a real marvel moving between the historical nightmare of the attempted genocide of the Jews in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century and the personal dreams which anticipated Hitchens’ discovery of his mother’s identity. The publication of these two books at the end of the eighties revealed one of the major writers of our time. And the writer was soon called to political action. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie to death in February 1989 gave Hitchens a cause to which he would devote much of the rest of his life – the defense of Enlightenment values against fundamentalist religion and particular the fundamentalist Islam espoused by Khomeini.

1989 would also mark a major change in Hitchens’s life. I normally met Christopher in New York but on this occasion our paths crossed in Los Angeles. I was screening a film at the American Film Market and Christopher, as part of his research for Blood Class and Nostalgia, was attending a ceremony in which the Duke of Edinburgh was presenting the Winston Churchill award to Ronald Reagan. The Nation for which Christopher wrote a column was, like the New Statesman, a magazine of great prestige which paid very little. Christopher augmented his earnings by talks: one of the main attractions of Pittsburgh was that it provided a steady stream of fees. But at this stage of his career the fees were relatively modest and Christopher who was always careful about money did not want to waste any of this precious income on expensive hotels. In Pittsburgh he stayed with me, in Los Angeles Steve Wasserman, the editor of Blood Class and Nostalgia, suggested he stayed with a friend who had a spare room. Christopher proposed that he invite this friend to the dinner we had arranged. When I got to the restaurant I discovered that the friend was a drop dead gorgeous Californian called Carol Blue who combined remarkable beauty with an extraordinary range of intellectual and cultural reference. When I arrived at the table Carol was gazing at Christopher with all the rapt attention of someone who had just experienced a coup de foudre. I thought I might divert some of this attention to my good self and I put on my full fireworks display, an informed discussion of the relations between Benjamin and Adorno, an analysis of the current Hollywood trends (above all the trending stars) and a range of political analyses from Karl Marx to George Herbert Walker Bush. Although I say it myself, my torrent of intelligence should have captured the young beauty’s attention, but her gaze never wavered from Christopher and I’m not sure that she was even aware that I was at the table.

I thought that this humiliation made an amusing enough story. The hapless MacCabe vainly tries to attract the beauty’s attention who can only stare at Hitchens with rapt devotion. This story did raise a few laughs from mutual friends in the coming days. And then I got a phone call from Christopher. Although not unprecedented, I phoned him more than he phoned me, his tone was one I had never heard before. “You know that you’re talking to everybody about our dinner in Los Angeles. Well please stop, indeed expunge it from your memory.” All became clear when he summoned me to a lunch in Washington less than a week later to inform me that he had met the love of his life and that he was going to leave Eleni who was pregnant with their second child and marry Carol.

Christopher was a stand up guy, he is the only person that I have ever borrowed money from and when I had a manic breakdown in 1992 he came all the way down to Devon, where I was recuperating, to check that I still had all my marbles. He was also, however, extremely selfish. This was most evident in his absolute determination that his writing took precedence over any other commitment. In this case it meant that he would countenance no argument that would prevent him joining his life to Carol which he did in very short order. Christopher was already well on his way to becoming an American. He was a long time resident of Washington and more at home in New York than probably any other city including London but now he became a Californian as well. He adored Carol’s parents Edwin and Gertrude Blue, old leftists both, and spent more and more of his time in their extraordinarily comfortable and hospitable house in Flood Circle next to the Stanford campus. Edwin had enjoyed a successful career in physics after serving in the Pacific at the end of the war against Japan. When he retired he took advantage of living in Silicon Valley to develop a piece of financial software which ensured an existence comfortable enough that he could build a guest house and a swimming pool on his Flood Circle lot which could accommodate not only Christopher and Carol but their newly arrived daughter Antonia, to whom I was delighted to become a godfather, and itinerant friends.

I found myself increasingly seeing Christopher in California. I had never much liked Washington nor indeed Christopher’s friends there but Christopher changed drastically in the 90s. First he had become famous and not just in Oxford. I remember how astonished I was when he came to Pittsburgh in early 1991 to speak against the First Gulf War. In every restaurant or bar we entered, he would be assailed by strangers determined to shake his hand and tell him how much they admired him. Even more extraordinary we could not progress ten yards down any street without someone approaching us to offer praise and encouragement to the great man, one person even got down on their knees. I’m still not entirely sure how to explain this phenomenon. The obvious reason is his writing, he was now one of the great essayists in English combining political commentary with cultural analysis. But I now suspect that as important was his ever more frequent appearances on television. One minor reason that I found Washington uncongenial was that almost any dinner would be interrupted by Christopher saying that he had to absent himself briefly to make an appearance on North Dakota News or Perspectives from Peoria. I used mock him roundly for his willingness to appear on any television show however tiny its audience. Indeed I mocked him for appearing on any television at all.

Christopher would always reply with Gore Vidal’s dictum that one should never turn down any opportunity to have sex or appear on television. It must be said that a quick perusal of YouTube shows that Christopher was right and I was stupid. His television appearances may have been part of his ascent to stardom in the early nineties. It is certainly a major factor in his ever-growing fame since his death. There are hundreds of clips online where one can see Christopher at his effervescent best combining humour, reason and ridicule to vanquish any foe foolish enough to take him on. I don’t think that I have seen every clip of Christopher on YouTube but I have not seen one in which Christopher was bested and the number of his humiliated opponents is legion. This fame was boosted when Graydon Carter was made editor of Vanity Fair in 1992 and as one of his first decisions made Christopher a star columnist. Vanity Fair not only gave Christopher a much larger bully pulpit than the Nation offered but a hugely increased salary. He could also now command increased speaking fees. The constant worry about money which had plagued him at both the New Statesman and The Nation now evaporated.

Christopher’s increasing fame and celebrity was slightly marred for me by the fact that he appeared to go mad. I will never forget the Sunday in the late 1990s when ,in New York to shoot a documentary, I turned on the morning shows to find Christopher frothing on screen. The first terrible sign was that he was wearing a spectacularly ill judged beard (as befitted a Navy brat it was a ‘full set’). But the beard wasn’t the worst of it. Christopher was talking about Clinton with a passion that suggested a truly pathological hatred. It was not that what he said about the liar from Arkansas was without merit, Christopher had long ago convinced me of Clinton’s systemic mendacity and vicious conservatism. But as Christopher writhed in his chair, the cool contempt which was one of his most effective rhetorical weapons deserted him in favour of a shouty hatred which came across as more than slightly unhinged.

To this day I remain baffled by the extraordinary loathing that he felt for Clinton. There is no doubt that this loathing was firmly based in fact. His little book on Clinton No one left to lie to is perhaps the best of his political pamphlets, providing a remorseless account of Clinton’s pledge to ‘’abolish welfare as we know it” which was the death knell of Western social democracy. He also found Clinton morally repugnant in his willingness to sacrifice a lobotomized black prisoner on death row or the inhabitants of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory in order to push unwelcome stories off the front page the next day. But when all Clinton’s moral and political shortcomings are taken in to account, there is something genuinely obsessed in Christopher’s relentless attacks on the boy from Hope Arkansas. They had a lot in common as their sexual paths crossed if they did not coincide at Oxford where Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Christopher was particularly exercised by Clinton’s treatment of his mistresses, above all Gennifer Flowers. I remember him almost spitting with anger at Clinton’s description of a ten-year love affair as a “mistake”.

It may be, however, that there is no need to seek for deep psychological reasons for Christopher’s loathing for “Slick Willy”. In the nineties Christopher had two great political causes: to persuade the Unites States to intervene militarily against Milosevic’s Greater Serbia and to make clear at the highest level that the Unites States leant its backing to Salman Rushdie. Christopher was successful in both these campaigns but they gave him a very close up view of the mendacities and complete cowardice of President Clinton. It also, in the case of Greater Serbia, provided Christopher with some strange bedfellows. He describes the situation in the preface to the second edition of Blood Class and Nostalgia which was published in 2004 with the altered title of Blood, Class and Empire. “In the result, the American military rescue of Sarajevo by a brief aerial bombardment was the outcome of, another coalition, not so much of the “willing” as of the internationalist left liberals and the neo-conservatives”(p.xviii). Christopher does not expand at length on this coalition but he make clear that it supported the military intervention in Kosovo and the context emphasizes that its most important achievement was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It is an unceasing source of amazement to me that this limited and very specific alliance with the neo-cons has been parsed, against all the evidence, as signaling that Hitchens became a neo-con in his old age. I am going to take two different examples of this falsehood to show how widespread it has become. Julian Barnes, a very serious novelist, who overlapped at the New Statesman with Christopher, and had every reason to know the truth manages to claim in a 2014 New Statesman interview that Christopher became a neo-con in America. It is obvious that Barnes has no idea what the term means. The core political feature of modern American neo-conservatism is an unquestioning support of Israel. Christopher never wavered in his anti-Zionism and his pro- Palestinian sympathies. It is true that as a Trotskyist in the seventies he believed in the use of violence to achieve political objectives. He maintained this belief throughout his life. For me it explains his support both for the Falklands war and the invasion of Iraq. It is true that in the period leading up to March 2003 his Washington apartment became a kind of war room for those who wished to ‘change the weather’ over regime change in Iraq and I still think of this period with both regret and disagreement. However, to characterize Christopher, at any stage of his life, as a neo-con is grotesque. To show that this canard is just as easily repeated by a younger generation one can turn to an article on Salman Rushdie by Hadley Freeman in the Observer of 14^th August 2022. In an otherwise excellent article Freeman repeats the widespread error when she says that Christopher Hitchens succumbed to ‘the siren song of reactionary conservatism’ as he aged. Hitchens’s political belief in violence was an unchanging thread in all his writings, a belief shared by many if not most of the left. In Christopher’s case this belief was sustained both by family background, his father had been a Naval Commander in the Second World War, and by his youthful Trotskyism. But he never took up reactionary conservatism. From his unflinching support of the Palestinian cause to his unceasing attacks on all forms of bigotry and superstition Christopher fought reaction wherever he encountered it.

For the record it must also be said that Christopher’s belief in the Iraq invasion didn’t survive a week after the American troops entered the Iraqi capital. The looting of the Baghdad Museum was the first in a dreadful series of events which made him less and less willing to defend the American occupation. He never wavered in his belief that Saddam Hussein deserved his fate but his only defence of the invasion was now in relation to Kurdistan. His visit to Saddam Hussein’s killing fields of Halabja where the Kurds had been subjected to unspeakable chemical attack in 1991 was one of the defining moments of Christopher’s life. When he took his eldest son to Iraq in 2007, the visit was above all a visit to Kurdistan. I republished in Critical Quarterly, with Christopher’s assent, his account of the visit which included the following paragraph:

“While I am confessing, I may as well make a clean breast of it. Thanks to the reluctant decision of the first President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, those fresh princes of ‘realism’, the United States and Britain placed an aerial umbrella over Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991 and detached it from the death grip of Saddam Hussein. Under the protective canopy of the no-fly zone – actually it was called the ‘you-fly-you-die zone’– an embryonic Iraq had a chance to grow. I was among those who thought and believed and argued that this example could, and should, be extended across the rest of the country; the cause became a consuming thing in my life. To describe the resulting shambles as a disappointment or a failure or even a defeat would be the weakest statement I could possibly make; it feels more like a sick, choking nightmare of betrayal from which there can be no awakening. Yet Kurdistan continues to demonstrate how things could have been different, and it isn’t a place from which the West can simply walk away.”

Christopher never became a neo-con and indeed he remained in a strong sense a Marxist: he never abandoned the materialist theory of history and he clove hard to the dialectic. But he ceased to be a socialist. I cannot be sure of the exact date but I do remember him saying in the early nineties that he wanted to strike one last blow for the cause. It was typical that his final statement of allegiance was in terms of violence but when I next asked him about socialism in 1995 he just shook his head and said “too many people”. He was more specific in an interview on 6^th April 2003 just after the invasion of Baghdad and just before the looting of the Baghdad Museum:

“Well, I have been saying to myself for a while in my internal dialogue on this …. that it was a lot easier to say that one was a Marxist than that one was a socialist. Most people thought the softer, more agreeable answer was to say I’m a socialist but of course I’m not a Marxist. No, on the contrary, I don’t think I could stop thinking like a Marxist if I tried, because I think the theory, the materialist conception of history hasn’t been surpassed and isn’t going to be. There isn’t really another way to think about it, and there is conflict between the forces and relations of production. That is real. And, yes indeed, capitalism has a long-term tendency to slump, to overproduction, to monopoly and the rest of the blatantly obvious. But what there isn’t any more is any conception of its replacement or transcendence.” (Critical Quarterly vol 45,issue 1-2 summer 2003 p.151).

By now Christopher’s attacks on Salafist Islam had made him an even more prominent public figure and he used this position to write what is certainly his most famous and, in many ways, his best book God is not Great. Its strengths are a spectacular range of historical reference and the keenest of attentions to the sacred texts that underpin the three great monotheisms. Its weakness is a complacent religious belief that there are scientific explanations for all important questions. In particular Dawkins’s theory of the selfish gene will not bear the weight that Christopher requires. There can be no doubt that Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene is the most successful work of ideology in the last fifty years. An enormous number of people use its theories as their most fundamental level of explanation. However you would be hard put to find any biologists and even fewer philosophers of biology who accept Dawkins theory of an anthropomorphized gene which is the single engine of evolution. Even given this considerable caveat Christopher’s book is a marvel and indeed may turn out to rival Dawkins in terms of its ideological effects; it remains the single most important attack on monotheism of my generation.

By the beginning of the new century our meetings had taken on a rather different rhythm, Pittsburgh and New York were replaced by Flood Circle outside Palo Alto and Carol and Christopher’s apartment in Washington, thankfully purged of neo-cons. I loved driving down from Pittsburgh to DC in the early spring as the blossom exploded. We were still young enough that this pattern seemed to stretch into the far future. And then in August 2010 I got the e-mail from Christopher which stated with admirable brevity his medical condition and the poor prognosis. Poor but not hopeless. Christopher had always said to me, and he is the only person who ever did say it to me, that he did not want to go out swiftly with a heart attack or a stroke: “I want to see death coming. I want to take its measure”. Well he got his wish and his measuring of death may well be his most consequential legacy. In his fight with illness Christopher found huge support in Carol’s fierce desire to see him live This desire was essential to Christopher’s own ability to cope with the gradual decline of his body. Their life together, on this final voyage, was plain sailing.

It was Carol who rang me in February of 2011 with a simple request. She and Antonia wanted to take a weekend off nursing, would I come down and look after Christopher? I said yes without hesitation but I was full of foreboding as I drove down to Washington, not through budding blossoms but through a bleak winter landscape. I was worried that I would not know how to handle Christopher sick and not much looking forward to the sight of him ravaged by disease. I really shouldn’t have worried. He was, it is true, physically much changed but his bald head made him look like a serene Buddha and he was not in any obvious pain. And as for handling Christopher sick, that was as impossible as handling him healthy – Christopher just did what he wanted to do. He may have drunk slightly less than in our salad days but I wouldn’t have bet on it. He did even more work than I remember, bashing out a prescient piece on the Arab Spring as I mixed cocktails, and he even insisted on going out to his favourite restaurant La Tomate. It was quite a good restaurant but its signature dish for Christopher was their willingness to let him smoke on the porch. When I suggested at some absurdly early hour that we should stop drinking and go to bed, Christopher was full of contempt and tenderness. It was absurd to contemplate bed at such an early hour when we would never again have the chance to talk all night long about Rosa Luxembourg and Thomas Jefferson, never mind quoting Dylan and Auden. And so we rioted on. This was one of Christopher’s favourite phrases summoning up images of sexual and political debauch to garnish what would be more accurately described as two old men getting drunk. I don’t know what time we got to bed but it was yet another night very well spent

When I left the States I was sure that I would never see Christopher again, I was bound for India where I would stay until December and he couldn’t live that long. In our long last night he had told me that he didn’t want to live one day after he could no longer write. Each week I scanned Slate for his column and miraculously each week it was there. He was still filing when I left India and I began to think that I would get to the States in January in time to see him again.

Friday, 16 December

The first text comes at 9 am from Hanif. Anita Bennett rings at 11 then all my children. Christopher is dead.

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

Par où commencer, where to begin? Racine and Barthes’s question is particularly apt in the present case. Should I start with when I first saw Flavia? Actually I can’t remember, but only because sight had been comprehensively outgunned by rumour. Her beauty, her ridiculous upper-class accent, her extravagance – all had reached my ears long before I saw her. Anyway, it would take too long. I think, for the purposes of this story, I will start with the e-mail that I sent Sandro Kopp on August 31st:

Dear Sandro,

Flavia and I are getting married in Venice next week (Tuesday 8th). I’m afraid, as Keith Richards said – all these bits of paper finally catch up with you. Only guests are our children. I’ve been trying to arrange a photographer (how fucking boring) and suddenly thought that, if you can imagine some way to paint it, I would much prefer a Kopp. Terms to be negotiated.

Love,
Colin

I was willing to fly him to Venice, but there was no need. Miraculously, he was going to be in the Serenissima on the 8th; even more miraculously, he was completely at our disposal. He and Tilda were promoting her latest film at the festival. They had decided to keep the 8th free to lounge around in Venice, so they would lounge around with us. Or rather, he would be the wedding snapper and then use the photos to help him with the painting. For years we had planned to be five, but now we were seven. Flavia’s sister was of the opinion that this would improve the tone and behaviour of the party, as unalloyed MacCabes is a recipe for unacceptable behaviour.

The party started on the 7th. Flavia and I had installed ourselves in the Palazzo San Angelo. We’d booked the best room – on the first floor, with balconies on the Grand Canal and a view of the Rialto. More important than this luxury, I had provided myself with enough spare cash to travel everywhere by water taxi. Venice, if you have never seen it – and it is the single most astonishing sight you will ever see – is built on water. There are three ways to move around Venice: water buses – very like the 71D in Pittsburgh – gondolas, impossibly slow and expensive, and water taxis, very fast and even more expensive. When I first came to Venice and saw the rich using water taxis, I consoled myself that they were heading for the tumbrels. On later visits I just envied them. Now I was paying 100 dollars for a five-minute ride and, yes, once again – the rich do have it better: Venice by water taxi is considerably more enjoyable than Venice by 71D.

It took two water taxis to get the ball rolling. Finn and Johanna were flying in from London; Fergus was arriving by train from Siena. I had decided that we would lunch at Murano, which is an island in the lagoon and where the children had loved watching the glass blowers when they were young. The restaurant was on a canal and had its own jetty. However, our taxi driver refused to draw up there, for reasons I thought inadequate. I was explaining to him, in full red-faced, macho boss mode, what he should do when, either by accident or design (this was a subject of much later debate at lunch), he touched the throttle and my hectoring remarks were abruptly curtailed as I was upended into the bottom of the boat. This put everybody into a very good mood.

A huge lunch consumed, we now headed back in one water taxi to our hotel. There is one thing that can be said for my children – they are very good-looking. The three of them together make quite an effect. The hotel was visibly impressed. Most unusually, Flavia was obviously proud of her children – not a common sight. Fergus’s wedding present was marijuana, so we repaired to the children’s adjoining and connecting rooms, while Flavia went for a sleep. The rest of the day is a bit of a blur, but I do remember another huge meal.

I woke early on the 8th and went downstairs to sit outside and watch the city waking. Once again, I could not believe our luck with the weather. Venice is usually very humid and often horribly hot. But for our three days, it was perfect sunlight, a temperature in the mid-seventies, and no humidity. I watched the barges taking out the rubbish and bringing in the day’s supplies and thought, as one cannot help doing, of Venice’s history. Once the greatest maritime power in the Mediterranean, it is now a hollowed-out husk of a city, the biggest museum in the world. Wonderful to visit but slightly creepy after about three days. I tried to reflect on my life but failed. The only real thought I had was that, as a young man, I had always thought the marriage vows obviously bogus. How, in the face of the evidence, could you promise to spend the rest of your life with someone? You might say that you hoped you would, or even expected that you would, but the definitive vow was a nonsense. What I liked about our wedding was that, even if I ran off with a chambermaid the next day, I had spent most of my life with Flavia. When I communicated this to Flavia, she was of the opinion that my likelihood of finding a chambermaid was nil.

Sandro rang to say that they were on the water bus heading towards us, and he asked if I was nervous. I suddenly realized that I was. Even more surprising, so was Flavia. Sandro and Tilda then arrived in holiday mode and Sandro began sketching the children. Johanna was first and looked great in a grey dress, but when she was finished there was no sign of Fergus, who was next. I went upstairs to their room to find the sons screaming at each other about who could use the bathroom first. The spectacle of two images of myself behaving as badly as me was sobering, as was the thought that they looked like a stereotypical pair of Irish brothers. Finally, they arrived to be sketched.

Then Flavia arrived in a very elegant bright green wedding dress that I had not been allowed to see. Her hair had been very well done by the Venetian hairdressers and I thought that, if nothing else, we made a handsome couple. This belief lasted until the wedding photographs, where I just looked fat. Soon we were in the water taxi and on our way to the Comune in the Palazzo Cavalli. As we waited for the previous wedding to finish, I expected Italians to come swarming out, but lo and behold, it was an English wedding. I reflected that I should not have been surprised. There are no Venetians left in this morgue of a city, so presumably most of the weddings are for foreigners – indeed, it must be a substantial part of their tourist trade.

Now it was our turn and the very amiable Italian official, whom we had met on our recce last year and with whom we had finalized all the papers the day before, appeared in a huge tricolore sash. The preliminaries over, he read the relevant articles of the Italian state’s laws on matrimony (I was so pleased not to be getting married in a church), after which all we had to say was “Sì”. According to Johanna, Flavia pronounced the most reluctant and disgusted “sì” in the history of the Italian language, but I was so busy following the Italian (I had scorned a translator) that I didn’t notice this last act of insubordination.

Sandro was hopping around with his camera and we had to pose for various pictures. Tilda and Fergus had gathered up some confetti from the previous wedding and then we were back in the water taxi and heading down the Grand Canal towards St Mark’s and the Bauer hotel. Never had Venice seemed so beautiful and, as a bonus, it was Finn’s first time in the city and so there was the pleasure of his delight as well. Then we arrived at the hotel. The maître d’ was already primed, but the welcoming party suddenly became even larger and more animated when they realized that we had a star with us (Tilda’s face had been all over the papers for the previous two days). We sat down and the wine started to flow. Joan Baez’s words came to my mind – “Speaking strictly for me / We both could have died then and there” – but I didn’t share them with Flavia, as she would have demurred.

As I gazed on the Salute and the open waters of the lagoon, with the sun dancing on the waves, I did think that it didn’t get much better than this. But it did.

So then we said goodbye to Tilda and Sandro, who had enjoyed themselves hugely, and set off back to the hotel. We all agreed that it was a real stroke of good fortune that Tilda and Sandro had come. I was pleased that Tilda, a member both of the school of Cambridge and the school of Jarman, had been there, and there was no question that it had improved behaviour. The rest of the afternoon passed as the day before, with everyone saying they couldn’t possibly eat anything more. Later that evening we sat down to another four-course meal. Johanna asked, “You haven’t had a chance to consummate your marriage yet.” She grinned and the boys looked disgusted. “Don’t worry,” I said, “we had a quickie in the loos at the Hotel Bauer.” The boys grinned and Johanna looked disgusted.

At first glance my title might seem like an addition to a burgeoning new genre in which a writer suffering from a terminal disease chronicles their journey to a death foretold. The most famous example of this new genre is my old and dear friend Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality. We speakers of English have not yet agreed on a name, but CPT suggests that the smart money is on “terminal illness memoir”. My former teacher Jacques Derrida has suggested to French speakers “autothanatography”. I’m sure the bookies aren’t offering odds on this semantic race, but if there were long odds on Derrida, I’d be tempted to take a slight punt.

This Substack memoir is not an addition to that genre, however named. Christopher talks about the real death; my topic is an imaginary one. Of course, and this provides a little frisson as I write, I cannot know that 2026 will not be the year of my death, but that has been true of every year I have survived since 1949. What makes 2026 the year of my death is that I chose it as such.

One of my handicaps as a memoir writer is that I have a poor visual memory, but I can summon up the moment of that choice at will. I am walking down Rathbone Place, having just left my offices and cutting rooms in Rathbone Street. I have not turned left at Gresse Street to reach the BFI’s main offices in Stephen Street, but am heading towards Oxford Street and lunch in Soho. My dress is smart casual. Cambridge, where I studied and taught for fourteen years, is a great centre of learning; it is also one of the dress‑down capitals of the world. My daily uniform throughout this period was a donkey jacket and jeans.

In 1981 I was appointed, at a very young age, to a Professorship in English Studies at Strathclyde University. Strathclyde is built on a very steep hill and in the second week there I was toiling up the hill to the library when I heard urgent steps behind me. I looked back to see Tommy Carberry, the Professor of Office Administration in our business school, running up the hill after me. As Carberry was well over sixty and had a face that looked as though it had been marinated in malt whisky for several decades, I was terrified that I was going to have to perform a cardiac resuscitation for which I was ill prepared. I stopped, but Carberry did not break stride until he reached me. Grabbing me by the arm he said, “Listen, sonny. I don’t know where you come from, but in Glasgow professors don’t wear donkey jackets, they wear suits.”

I thanked him for his sartorial advice and, following that most trustworthy of clichés, “When in Rome, do as the Romans,” I wore a suit to work for four years. But when I became Head of Production at the British Film Institute in 1985, I varied the uniform. A smart suit jacket was retained but instead of a shirt and tie I wore a T‑shirt advertising my other employer, the University of Pittsburgh (never miss a chance to boost the brand – that’s what they’re paying you for), and upmarket jeans. This meant that, until lunch and for the first time in my life, I looked relatively well turned out.

In his memoir Not Entitled Frank Kermode described me as “fair of face”; Christopher Hitchens, in a Tatler profile, chose to compare me to Mr Messy. Before lunch you might have thought that Kermode had a point; after lunch it was certain that Hitchens had nailed it. My shirt was always covered in the remains of my lunch and, something I have never understood, my jeans as well.

I was also in a state of hypomania. Textbooks define hypomania as “a psychiatric condition characterized by a sustained period of abnormally elevated, expansive, or irritable mood accompanied by increased energy and activity levels”. It becomes diagnosable if this mood lasts more than four days. In my case hypomania didn’t last four days: it was my default frame of mind, particularly if I was busy. It meant that ideas cascaded through my mind at warp speed and that stopping the rush to concentrate on a single subject was a strenuous effort.

However, just such an effort was now required. I had a new cash card and the accompanying letter with my PIN. I knew that, although the PIN is only four numbers and there is no certainty that I will remember it, I must choose a PIN that nobody can guess but that will immediately be lodged in my mind. I have a brainwave. Everybody knows, or could discover, the year of my birth, but nobody knows the date of my death.

I could take a realistic view and make an informed guess from the fate of my nearest male relations. My father, Myles MacCabe, died of a heart attack at 61; my grandfather Frank MacCabe, ditto. My uncle Brian made it a hat‑trick. My uncle Niall broke the symmetry by dying both younger, 58, and from pancreatic cancer. However, it had been clear to me for a long time that I was biologically slated for death at 60.

It was 1988 and my 40th birthday was a year away. I felt rather strongly that another twenty years was not enough. Then I thought of my father‑in‑law Michael Lambert, who is much addicted to quoting the Bible. Like many good Anglicans it is difficult to tell whether he believes in God, but he certainly believes in the Authorized Version. One of his most frequent quotations is from Psalm 90:10, suggesting that “three score and ten” is a good yardstick for age. “Score” is an archaic word meaning twenty, so I have got to seventy and I breathe a sigh of relief.

What had started out as a minor chore en route to inhaling my first drink of the day has turned into a Faustian negotiation. I am bargaining with the Devil. But even seventy seems too close for comfort. Let’s add a tip of 10% and we reach 77. A moment of hesitation, because I am freely acquiescing in a death at 77 in exchange for being spared death at 60. The buttons are pushed and 2026 is engraved in my memory.

Miraculously this numeric mantra has worked and I have sailed past both 60 and 70. But now 2026 is at hand. Immediately I have the bore of changing the PIN for all my cash cards when this preface is published. More significantly, I am starting the Substack memoir as an act of sympathetic magic which will render 2026 merely another year in my life and not the temporal mark for the hour of my death.

I do have other reasons beside superstition to undertake this task. One topic that will receive substantial attention is drugs. Cannabis will be a constant backbeat from my first term at Cambridge, but there will be brief consideration of acid, opium, amphetamines. I have unfortunately never tried ecstasy, ketamine or fentanyl. While pinching weed from your children was very borderline, asking them to go out and buy you illegal drugs is a shame (and indeed a prison stretch) too far.

“Legalise drugs”: my initial research posting will take fentanyl for its subject and examine the hypothesis that fentanyl offers a spectacular pharmaceutical opportunity to the globe. The star of the drugs show will, however, undoubtedly be drink – drink containing alcohol. Next week’s post will start a long thread with an examination of my memory of the first time I asked myself the question “Am I an alcoholic?”

But I’m still clearing my throat, and before we dive into drink I want to invite you to my wedding next week. It will be in Venice on 8 September 2009, three days before Flavia turns 60. We have invited only our three children, but the good gondola Serendipity will place Tilda Swinton and Sandro Kopp in the Most Serene City on that date, footloose and fancy‑free.