The Hitch is dead.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMbAEKhvDRg

dead one

i ain't afraid of death. I was dead for trillion of years before I was born, and it hadn't suffered me.

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dailyhitchens.com wrote:

In accordance with Christopher’s wishes, his body was donated to medical research. Memorial gatherings will occur next year.

amacachi

I hope someone (probably Atheism Ireland despite all our grievances with them) will sort something out for Dublin/Ireland. It would be a bloody excellent get-together.

J C

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A great mind is now silent.

He was a man whose opinions I didn't always share ... but I admired the clarity and courtesy with which he expressed them.

My deepest condolences to all who knew and loved him.

HUNK

TheraminTrees made a vid

MagicMarker

HUNK wrote: »

TheraminTrees made a vid

Whoever made that is a gob****e, am I supposed to listen or read? I can't do both.

Sarky

Try it once Christmas is over and your blood alcohol levels are closer to normal? :pac:

snafuk35

How about Roger Allam as the great man himself?

Sarky

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Anyone else getting the urge to print Three Hitchens Moon shirts?

robindch

Salman Rushdie on Christopher Hitchens:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/02/rushdie-on-hitchens-201202.print

Salman Rushdie wrote:

Targeted by Khomeini in 1989, the author found himself with a formidable champion: Christopher Hitchens. Salman Rushdie recalls his friend's many joyfully waged battles, not least the Hitch's magnificent argument with Death.

On June 8, 2010, I was "in conversation" with Christopher Hitchens at the 92nd Street Y in New York in front of his customary sellout audience, to launch his memoir, Hitch-22. Christopher turned in a bravura performance that night, never sharper, never funnier, and afterward at a small, celebratory dinner the brilliance continued. A few days later he told me that it was on the morning of the Y event that he had been given the news about his cancer. It was hard to believe that he had been so publicly magnificent on such a privately dreadful day. He had shown more than stoicism. He had flung laughter and intelligence into the face of death.

Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don't Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick, a.k.a. Moby-Cock. And, as the not-quite version of Joseph Heller's comic masterpiece, Hitch-22. Christopher rescued this last title from the slush pile of our catechism of failures and redeemed it by giving it to the text which now stands as his best memorial.

Laughter and Hitchens were inseparable companions, and comedy was one of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. When we were both on Real Time with Bill Maher in 2009 along with Mos Def, and the rapper began to offer up a series of cockeyed animadversions about Iran's nuclear program and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, Christopher became almost ferally polite, addressing Mos, as he tore into his ideas, by the faux-respectful moniker "Mr. Definitely," a name so belittlingly funny that it rendered even more risible the risible notions which Mr. D. was trying to advance.

Behind the laughter was what his friend Ian McEwan called "his Rolls-Royce mind," that organ of improbable erudition and frequently brilliant, though occasionally flawed, perception. The Hitch mind was indeed a sleek and purring machine trimmed with elegant fittings, but his was not a rarefied sensibility. He was an intellectual with the instincts of a street brawler, never happier than when engaged in moral or political fisticuffs. When I became involved in a public disagreement with the eminent spy novelist John le Carré, Hitchens leapt unbidden into the fray and ratcheted the insult level up many notches, comparing the great man's conduct to "that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head." The argument, I'm sorry to report, grew uglier after the Hitch's intervention.

The le Carré dispute took place during the long years of argument and danger that followed the 1988 publication of my novel The Satanic Verses and the attack upon its author, publishers, translators, and booksellers by the minions and successors of the theocratic tyrant of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. It was during these years that Christopher, a good but not intimate friend since the mid-1980s, drew closer to me, becoming the most indefatigable of allies and the most eloquent of defenders.

I have often been asked if Christopher defended me because he was my close friend. The truth is that he became my close friend because he wanted to defend me.

The spectacle of a despotic cleric with antiquated ideas issuing a death warrant for a writer living in another country, and then sending death squads to carry out the edict, changed something in Christopher. It made him understand that a new danger had been unleashed upon the earth, that a new totalizing ideology had stepped into the down-at-the-heels shoes of Soviet Communism. And when the brute hostility of American and British conservatives (Charles Krauthammer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Paul Johnson) joined forces with the appeasement politics of sections of the Western left, and both sides began to offer sympathetic analyses of the assault, his outrage grew. In the eyes of the right, I was a cultural "traitor" and, in Christopher's words, an "uppity wog," and in the opinion of the left, the People could never be wrong, and the cause of the Oppressed People, a category into which the Islamist opponents of my novel fell, was doubly justified. Voices as diverse as the Pope, the archbishop of New York, the British chief rabbi, John Berger, Jimmy Carter, and Germaine Greer "understood the insult" and failed to be outraged, and Christopher went to war.

He and I found ourselves describing our ideas, without conferring, in almost identical terms. I began to understand that while I had not chosen the battle it was at least the right battle, because in it everything that I loved and valued (literature, freedom, irreverence, freedom, irreligion, freedom) was ranged against everything I detested (fanaticism, violence, bigotry, humorlessness, philistinism, and the new offense culture of the age). Then I read Christopher using exactly the same everything-he-loved-versus-everything-he-hated trope, and felt . understood.

He, too, saw that the attack on The Satanic Verses was not an isolated occurrence, that, across the Muslim world, writers and journalists and artists were being accused of the same crimes-blasphemy, heresy, apostasy, and their modern-day associates, "insult" and "offense." And he intuited that beyond this intellectual assault lay the possibility of an attack on a broader front. He quoted Heine to me: Where they burn books they will afterward burn people. (And reminded me, with his profound sense of irony, that Heine's line, in his play Almansor, had referred to the burning of the Koran.) And on September 11, 2001, he, and all of us, understood that what had begun with a book burning in Bradford, Yorkshire, had now burst upon the whole world's consciousness in the form of those tragically burning buildings.

During the campaign against the fatwa, the British government and various human-rights groups pressed the case for a visit by me to the Clinton White House, to demonstrate the strength of the new administration's support for the cause. A visit was offered, then delayed, then offered again. It was unclear until the last minute if President Clinton himself would meet me, or if the encounter would be left to National-Security Adviser Anthony Lake and perhaps Warren Christopher, the secretary of state. Hitch worked tirelessly to impress on Clinton's people the importance of potus's greeting me in person. His friendship with George Stephanopoulos was perhaps the critical factor. Stephanopoulos's arguments prevailed and I was led into the presidential presence. Stephanopoulos called Christopher at once, telling him, triumphantly, "The Eagle has landed."

(On that visit to D.C., I stayed in the Hitchens apartment, and he was afterward warned by a State Department spook that my having been his houseguest may have drawn the danger toward him; maybe it would be a good idea if he moved house? He remained contemptuously unmoved.)

Christopher came to believe that the people who understood the dangers posed by radical Islam were on the right, that his erstwhile comrades on the left were arranging with one another to miss what seemed to him like a pretty obvious point, and so, never one to do things by halves, he did what looked to many people like a U-turn across the political highway to join forces with the war-makers of George W. Bush's administration. He became oddly enamored of Paul Wolfowitz. One night I happened to be at his apartment in D.C. when Wolfowitz, who had just left the administration, stopped by for a late-night drink and proceeded to deliver a critique of the Iraq war (all Rumsfeld's fault, apparently) which left me, at least, speechless. The Wolfowitz doctrine, Wolfowitz was saying, had not been Wolfowitz's idea. Indeed, Wolfowitz had been anti-Wolfowitz-doctrine from the beginning. This was an argument worthy of a character from Catch-22. I wondered how long Christopher would be able to tolerate such bedfellows.

Paradoxically, it was God who saved Christopher Hitchens from the right. Nobody who detested God as viscerally, intelligently, originally, and comically as C. Hitchens could stay in the pocket of god-bothered American conservatism for long. When he bared his fangs and went for God's jugular, just as he had previously fanged Henry Kissinger, Mother Teresa, and Bill Clinton, the resulting book, God Is Not Great, carried Hitch away from the American right and back toward his natural, liberal, ungodly constituency. He became an extraordinarily beloved figure in his last years, and it was his magnificent war upon God, and then his equally magnificent argument with his last enemy, Death, that brought him "home" at last from the misconceived war in Iraq.

When I completed a draft of my memoir, I sent a copy to Christopher, who was by this time very unwell. I didn't expect him to do more than glance at it. Instead, I received a longish e-mail containing a full critique of the text, pointing out errors of fact and quotation I'd made about Rupert Brooke and P. G. Wodehouse.

There was a last dinner in New York, at which the poet James Fenton and I, by previous agreement, set out to make him laugh as much as possible. Distressingly, this unleashed, at least once, a terrifying coughing fit. But he enjoyed himself that evening. It was the only gift his friends could give him near the end: an hour or two of being himself as he had always wished to be, the Hitch mighty and ample amongst the ones he loved, and not the diminishing Hitch having the life slowly squeezed out of him by the Destroyer of Days.

On his 62nd birthday-his last birthday, a painful phrase to write-I had been with him and Carol and other comrades at the Houston home of his friend Michael Zilkha, and we had been photographed standing on either side of a bust of Voltaire. That photograph is now one of my most treasured possessions: me and the two Voltaires, one of stone and one still very much alive. Now they are both gone, and one can only try to believe, as the philosopher Pangloss insisted to Candide in the elder Voltaire's masterpiece, that everything is for the best "in this best of all possible worlds."

It doesn't feel like that today.

HUNK

Apparently there is a petition to get a statue of Hitchens raised in his honour.

http://www.atheist-reference.org/

Please help get a statue of Christopher erected in London (and, after so many comments rightly suggesting it, we’ll try for DC too) by signing the e-petition below.

A hero to many people… a hero to reason, logic, literature, intellect, research, truth, and so much more. He should be remembered, and one day when the world becomes a better place people will look at that statue and know that he was at the forefront of the struggle to make it so, and that without him we would not have arrived there.

Dear Mr. Cameron and Mr. Clegg,
We the undersigned ask you to please give permission and a plot for a memorial statue in a prime position within the City of London, honouring national treasure Christopher Hitchens for his contributions to the UK and the world. We will raise the funds and build it, we just need the place and permission.
The statue will be made of tough stuff, as he was, and we will accept suggestions and/or votes from his many fans as to which of his numerous famous quotes to have on the plaque.
The statue could be crafted using the famous, iconic picture of Christopher in the trench coat, as seen on the home of this petition at atheist-reference.org
Please also consider that Hitch is one of a group of great thinkers, and that when the time comes we will be asking for statues of them too, keeping them all together in a "Skeptics Corner" or something would be great.
*NB: As people have commented, Christopher was dual nationality, we are therefore planning to try to use these same signatures to request something similar in Washington DC too.
Thank you.

I guess people REALLY want to preserve his memory.

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Carol Blue wrote a nice article about him recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9480797/Christopher-Hitchens-an-impossible-act-to-follow.html

The world isn't the same since his passing. I've read most of his articles and books, however I have a couple left to read and I can't really bring myself to do it just yet. I've pre-ordered his upcoming book Mortality as well.

I'm currently re-reading Why Orwell Matters, and I have to admit it's better the second time around!

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Currently reading his book Mortality which was downloaded to my kindle last night.

It's a collection of his essays from when he was ill, writing about dying from cancer.

I highly recommend it. It's quite short as well, but it is some of his best writing. Classic Hitch. If you're like me and you've read most of the stuff online, you'll still appreciate what he has to say. It's put together nicely and there's a lovely introduction with a mention of Emile Hirsch in there. Emile's article impressed me on HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emile-hirsch/christopher-hitchens-books_b_1154389.html

joseph brand

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Currently reading his book Mortality which was downloaded to my kindle last night.

It's a collection of his essays from when he was ill, writing about dying from cancer.

I highly recommend it. It's quite short as well, but it is some of his best writing. Classic Hitch. If you're like me and you've read most of the stuff online, you'll still appreciate what he has to say. It's put together nicely and there's a lovely introduction with a mention of Emile Hirsch in there. Emile's article impressed me on HuffPo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emile-hirsch/christopher-hitchens-books_b_1154389.html

From the above link:

He was downright emotional when it came to reading and ideas -- he wrote a withering review for John Updike's Terrorist, where he comments on sending the book, "Windmilling across the room in a spasm of boredom and annoyance" at one point while reading it -- a harsh reaction, but one that could never be mistaken for indifference.

My favourite book review.

The best album review was the review of Spinal Tap's 'Shark Sandwich'. It resulted in a two word review. 'Sh*t Sandwich'.

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joseph brand wrote: »

From the above link:


My favourite book review.

The best album review was the review of Spinal Tap's 'Shark Sandwich'. It resulted in a two word review. 'Sh*t Sandwich'.

I just finished reading it. It was sad reading his notes that he never got to put into an article or a book. The unfinished Hitch had so much left to say.

Andrewf20

Finished the book in 2 hours today in 1 session. A short yet fascinating read. Something rather haunting to read thru the final pages. I kept imagining the visual shell of the man in tumourtown (as he calls it) in his bed near the ending, still writing.

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A little Hitchens to brighten your day. It is Monday after all. :pac:

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Fantastic. So much for me getting an early night (11.25pm EST while I post this). Enjoy, comrades and friends.

pauldla

Oh how I wish I had youtube....

MagicMarker

Try and picture Christopher Hitchens at home, sitting on a fine leather arm chair with a glass of Johnny Walker Black in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a book that he's reviewing for the New York Times in his lap. What scholarly work must this be do you think? Why, it's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows of course, what else?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/books/review/Hitchens-t.html

In March 1940, in the “midnight of the century” that marked the depth of the Hitler-Stalin pact (or in other words, at a time when civilization was menaced by an alliance between two Voldemorts or “You-Know-Whos”), George Orwell took the time to examine the state of affairs in fantasy fiction for young people. And what he found (in an essay called “Boys’ Weeklies”) was an extraordinary level of addiction to the form of story that was set in English boarding schools. Every week, boys (and girls) from the poorer quarters of industrial towns and from the outer edges of the English-speaking Empire would invest some part of their pocket-money to keep up with the adventures of Billy Bunter, Harry Wharton, Bob Cherry, Jack Blake and the other blazer-wearing denizens of Greyfriars and St. Jim’s. As he wrote:

“It is quite clear that there are tens and scores of thousands of people to whom every detail of life at a ‘posh’ public school is wildly thrilling and romantic. They happen to be outside that mystic world of quadrangles and house-colors, but they can yearn after it, daydream about it, live mentally in it for hours at a stretch. The question is, Who are these people?”

I wish that the morose veteran of Eton and St. Cyprian’s had been able to join me on the publication night of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” when I went to a bookstore in Menlo Park, Calif., to collect my embargoed copy on behalf of the Book Review. Never mind the stall that said “Get Your House Colors Here” and was dealing with customers wise in the lore of Ravenclaw and Slytherin. On the floor of the shop, largely transformed into the Gryffindor common room for the occasion, sat dozens of small children listening raptly to a reading from a massively plausible Hagrid. Of the 2,000 or so people in the forecourt, perhaps one-third had taken the trouble to wear prefect gowns and other Hogwarts or quidditch impedimenta. Many wore a lightning-flash on their foreheads: Orwell would have recoiled at seeing the symbol of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists on otherwise unblemished brows, even if the emblem was tamed by its new white-magic associations. And this was a sideshow to the circus, all across the English-speaking and even non-English world, as the countdown to the witching hour began.

I would give a lot to understand this phenomenon better. Part of it must have to do with the extreme banality and conformity of school life as it is experienced today, with everything oriented toward safety on the one hand and correctness on the other. But this on its own would not explain my youngest daughter a few years ago, sitting for hours on end with her tiny elbow flattening the pages of a fat book, and occasionally laughing out loud at the appearance of Scabbers the rat. (One hears that not all children retain the affection for reading that the Harry Potter books have inculcated: this isn’t true in my house at least.)

Scabbers turns out to mutate into something a bit worse than a rat, and the ancient charm of metamorphosis is one that J. K. Rowling has exploited to the uttermost. Another well-tested appeal, that of the orphan hero, has also been given an intensive workout with the Copperfield-like privations of the eponymous hero. For Orwell, the English school story from Tom Brown to Kipling’s Stalky and Co. was intimately bound up with dreams of wealth and class and snobbery, yet Rowling has succeeded in unmooring it from these considerations and giving us a world of youthful democracy and diversity, in which the humble leading figure has a name that — though it was given to a Shakespearean martial hero and king — could as well belong to an English labor union official. Perhaps Anglophilia continues to play its part, but if I were one of the few surviving teachers of Anglo-Saxon I would rejoice at the way in which such terms as muggle and Wizengamot, and such names as Godric, Wulfric and Dumbledore, had become common currency. At this rate, the teaching of “Beowulf” could be revived. The many Latin incantations and imprecations could also help rekindle interest in the study of a “dead” language.

In other respects, too, one recognizes the school story formula. If a French or German or other “foreign” character appears in the Harry Potter novels, it is always as a cliché: Fleur and Krum both speak as if to be from “the Continent” is a joke in itself. The ban on sexual matters is also observed fairly pedantically, though as time has elapsed Rowling has probably acquired male readers who find themselves having vaguely impure thoughts about Hermione Granger (if not, because the thing seems somehow impossible, about Ginny Weasley). Most interesting of all, perhaps, and as noted by Orwell, “religion is also taboo.” The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some — like his holiness the pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series — while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:

“How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of — of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.”

For all this apparently staunch secularism, it is ontology that ultimately slackens the tension that ought to have kept these tales vivid and alive. Theologians have never been able to answer the challenge that contrasts God’s claims to simultaneous omnipotence and benevolence: whence then cometh evil? The question is the same if inverted in a Manichean form: how can Voldemort and his wicked forces have such power and yet be unable to destroy a mild-mannered and rather disorganized schoolboy? In a short story this discrepancy might be handled and also swiftly resolved in favor of one outcome or another, but over the course of seven full-length books the mystery, at least for this reader, loses its ability to compel, and in this culminating episode the enterprise actually becomes tedious. Is there really no Death Eater or dementor who is able to grasp the simple advantage of surprise?

The repeated tactic of deus ex machina (without a deus) has a deplorable effect on both the plot and the dialogue. The need for Rowling to play catch-up with her many convolutions infects her characters as well. Here is Harry trying to straighten things out with a servile house-elf:

“ ‘I don’t understand you, Kreacher,’ he said finally. ‘Voldemort tried to kill you, Regulus died to bring Voldemort down, but you were still happy to betray Sirius to Voldemort? You were happy to go to Narcissa and Bellatrix, and pass information to Voldemort through them ...’ ”

Yes, well, one sees why he is confused. The exchange takes place during an abysmally long period during which the threesome of Harry, Hermione and Ron are flung together, with weeks of time to spend camping invisibly and only a few inexplicable escapes from death to alleviate the narrative. The grand context of Hogwarts School is removed, at least until the closing scenes, and Rowling also keeps forgetting that things are either magical or they are not: Hermione’s family surely can’t be any safer from the Dark Lord by moving to Australia, and Hagrid’s corporeal bulk cannot make any difference to his ability, or otherwise, to mount a broomstick. A boring subtext, about the wisdom or otherwise of actually uttering Voldemort’s name, meanwhile robs the apotropaic device of its force.

For some time now the novels have been attempting a kind of secular dramatization of the battle between good and evil. The Ministry of Magic (one of Rowling’s better inventions) has been seeking to impose a version of the Nuremberg Laws on England, classifying its subjects according to blood and maintaining its own Gestapo as well as its own Azkaban gulag. But again, over time and over many, many pages this scenario fails to chill: most of the “muggle” population goes about its ordinary existence, and every time the secret police close in, our heroes are able to “disapparate” — a term that always makes me think of an attempt at English by George W. Bush. The prejudice against bank-monopoly goblins is modeled more or less on anti-Semitism and the foul treatment of elves is meant to put us in mind of slavery, but the overall effect of this is somewhat thin and derivative, and subject to diminishing returns.

In this final volume there is a good deal of loose-end gathering to be done. Which side was Snape really on? Can Neville Longbottom rise above himself? Are the Malfoys as black as they have been painted? Unfortunately — and with the solid exception of Neville, whose gallantry is well evoked — these resolutions prove to possess all the excitement of an old-style Perry Mason-type summing-up, prompted by a stock character who says, “There’s just one thing I don’t understand. ...” Most of all this is true of Voldemort himself, who becomes more tiresome than an Ian Fleming villain, or the vicious but verbose Nicolae Carpathia in the Left Behind series, as he offers boastful explanations that are at once grandiose and vacuous. This bad and pedantic habit persists until the final duel, which at least sees us back in the old school precincts once again. “We must not let in daylight upon magic,” as Walter Bagehot remarked in another connection, and the wish to have everything clarified is eventually self-defeating in its own terms. In her correct determination to bring down the curtain decisively, Rowling has gone further than she should, and given us not so much a happy ending as an ending which suggests that evil has actually been defeated (you should forgive the expression) for good.

Greater authors — Arthur Conan Doyle most notably — have been in the same dilemma when seeking closure. And, like Conan Doyle, Rowling has won imperishable renown for giving us an identifiable hero and a fine caricature of a villain, and for making a fictional bit of King’s Cross station as luminous as a certain address on nearby Baker Street. It is given to few authors to create a world apart, and to populate it as well as illustrate it in the mind. As one who actually did once go to boarding school by steam train, at 8, I enjoyed reading aloud to children and coming across Diagon Alley and Grimmauld Place, and also shuddering at the memory of the sarcastic schoolmasters (and Privet Drives) I have known.

The distinctly slushy close of the story may seem to hold out the faint promise of a sequel, but I honestly think and sincerely hope that this will not occur. The toys have been put firmly back in the box, the wand has been folded up, and the conjuror is discreetly accepting payment while the children clamor for fresh entertainments. (I recommend that they graduate to Philip Pullman, whose daemon scheme is finer than any patronus.) It’s achievement enough that “19 years later,” as the last chapter-heading has it, and quite probably for many decades after that, there will still be millions of adults who recall their initiation to literature as a little touch of Harry in the night.

Gbear

I got "Mortality" and read it on a recent flight. It was a bit of a swindle at $25 for a book that took 90 minutes to read but it was really powerful.

MagicMarker

Gbear wrote: »

I got "Mortality" and read it on a recent flight. It was a bit of a swindle at $25 for a book that took 90 minutes to read but it was really powerful.

Jesus, the hardback is only $13 on Amazon!

$7.87 for the kindle version.

Gbear

MagicMarker wrote: »

Jesus, the hardback is only $13 on Amazon!

$7.87 for the kindle version.

I was in the Airport in the US and I needed something to spend my last few dollars on.

It was somewhat amusing because I was in Memphis, TN, and next to the Hitch's book were bibles and bible study books, as well as that ****e about diet by Gillian McKeith.

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Gbear wrote: »

I got "Mortality" and read it on a recent flight. It was a bit of a swindle at $25 for a book that took 90 minutes to read but it was really powerful.

I paid 9.99 US Dollars for my copy. Where did you get it for that price?

I read 85% of the book before even buying it, via his journalistic columns. It was worth the money for the 'unwritten Hitch' at the end of the book; the little notes he made and never got to expand upon. Thinking about it again, it makes me a little sad. He's dead nearly a year now. Scary.

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Today would have been his birthday. Have a Johnnie Walker Black in his honour, you gorgeous bastards.

Sarky

Can't, have stopped buying Diageo labels due to them being dicks. Will fine scotch do?

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Sarky wrote: »

Can't, have stopped buying Diageo labels due to them being dicks. Will fine scotch do?

Fine Scotch will do indeed. I'm actually having an 18 year old Glenmorangie. I'm fairly certain I will be forgiven.

Lapin

Sarky wrote: »

Can't, have stopped buying Diageo labels due to them being dicks. Will fine scotch do?

At last - Someone else !

Good to know I'm not the only one who refuses to buy Diageo's stuff.


As for Hitch - I marked his birthday by watching Hell's Angel. His excellent documentary exposing that fraudulent old wench who went by the name Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

As a nod towards the cities of India, I chose to watch it with a generous quantity from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin !


Even from his non existent afterlife, I think the Hitch would approve.

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Lapin wrote: »

At last - Someone else !

Good to know I'm not the only one who refuses to buy Diageo's stuff.


As for Hitch - I marked his birthday by watching Hell's Angel. His excellent documentary exposing that fraudulent old wench who went by the name Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

As a nod towards the cities of India, I chose to watch it with a generous quantity from a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin !


Even from his non existent afterlife, I think the Hitch would approve.

Can't say I've seen it but I did read The Missionary Position which was fantastic. Must add this to my favourites.