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What will he write about on his travells now?Anyway,good luck to him.I kinda like the old lush :buddy:
Alastair Down has, under doctor’s orders (you’ll be dead in a year) given up the demon drink. His piece in today’s Post is his best writing of the last ten years, for that reason alone. I wish him well.
That’s good news Fat Al’s given up drinking, he’s looked terrible for some time. He’s a fine writer when he’s off the sauce.
This is the article (I’ve nicked it from elsewhere, I didn’t type it myself):
It is a moment probably understood by ageing boxers past their prime. Deep into a bruising battle in which they have been battered round the ring and horribly hurt by some youngster who would not have laid a glove on them in their glory days, the bell rings for the tenth round. But this time the old warrior does not rise from his stool. Though his every instinct is to go on, the cumulative effect of countless thousands of blows has taken its toll. It is not the body that is failing to answer the summons of the bell-it is something in the soul that tells him not only is this fight lost, but all fights.
Many jump jockeys have a similar meeting with their own truth. It comes unexpectedly and unlooked for. That morning when they wake to find three bad gaff rides and, with an extraordinary mix of pure funk and profound relief, admit to themselves: "God,I have had enough. I can’t do this anymore".
On an infinitely lower and less noble plane, your Tuesday columnist has been absent these four weeks as a result of a long process that amounted to an arrival at the bleak understanding that the game was up. It wasn’t the prognosis of being dead in a year or so that did it, or the gloriously exact picture of the agonies<br>in which I would depart, literally ridding myself of seven of the body’s eight pints of blood in about the same time as they take to run the Champion Hurdle.
Somewhere inside me the happy, heavy drinker of more than three decades was already dead. I was no longer the master of my old friend alcohol-I had become its serf. Those of us lucky to have loyal employers with the requisite insurance can take ourselves off to places where, over 28 days, you spend a vast sum of money, eat awful food, work morning, noon and evening, seven days a week, and learn what "tough love" really means from staff who have done all the mad and bad things you have, and have the merciless ability to skewer your inner torments with the metronome, repetitive accuracy of a darts champion thudding into treble twenty.
Of course you fight the humiliations, the intrusions and the raw lumps of emotion that pile up like so much<br>offal in an abattoir. And the more you fight, the more painful it gets and the more angry you become. Until suddenly, you come to the boxer’s moment and that bell rings out unheeded and unanswered. ‘Surrender to win’ is one of the buzz phrases, and once you wave the white flag it gets easier. They break you into very small pieces and then hand you a very small tube of mental and moral glue with which to stick yourself back together. Don’t ask me whether it will work, as I am now in ‘one day at a time mode’. All I can tell you is that after one month without a drink, there are just over 100 bottles of wine out there that have not met the nemesis of my corkscrew.
And in among the horror stories from my fellow travellers that reduced me to pints of tears and are literally unprintable in any paper in the land, oceans of hilarity and humour from the three wings of this great hospital-dubbed Addicts (drink and drugs), Saddos (psychiatric problems) and Twiglets (eating disorders). The van taking the snorters off to Cocaine Anonymous was the ‘Snowmobile’, while there was always competition among the pill-poppers and smackheads for the best seats in the ‘Druggy Buggy’.
After a lengthy meeting of the United Nations Security Council, they allowed me a daily copy of the Racing Post on the condition it was not waved under the noses of any compulsive gamblers. However, I wasn’t permitted to read it until after five and sadly my bookie wouldn’t let me place bets after racing, a la Dorothy Paget, or I could have paid for the month myself.
While this newly recovering alcoholic is not promising never to have another drink, I do solemnly swear not to become a bore about it and continue to buy my round without delivering a homily on hooch and handing you a copy of War Cry. In all honesty, I want the old me back and, while he wasn’t much, he was a sight better than the sad travesty of recent years. It is not too late properly to love my astonishingly supportive children and friends again, and to enjoy gently making amends to them all.
I have been warned, however, to watch out for ‘cross addiction’, whereby you switch alcohol energies into some fresh obsession. Luckily, while inside, I met only three women I want to marry. Nothing to worry about there then.
– – – – –
I’ve always liked Alastair’s column; him, and Peter Thomas, usually have insightful opinions, and justify them articulately and wittily. True, I’ve never been fond of Alastair when he pretends to be self-depreciating (anyone who uses such ostentatious, grand language is hardly lacking in confidence), but now his spirit is genuinely destroyed, I’ll forgive him for that. I wish him well…
<br> "Terry I’d offer you a beer but I’ve only got six cans"<br> (the likely lads)
Down has brought that similar sort of subtle ordinaryness to the circles racing under his eyes. A likeable bloke who connects but who would be difficult to spot on London Bridge.
:old: I happen to know he gets priveleged information from certain stables :shhh:
Quote: from gamble on 12:03 am on Feb. 7, 2007[br]<br> "Terry I’d offer you a beer but I’ve only got six cans"<br>                                    (the likely lads)
<br>Absolute classic comedy.
Good luck to you Mr Down. I wish you the best of success in conquering this illness. I hope you feel better and have a long life. I hope you then return to the journalism of 10 years ago when you were the first page I turned to.
I wish him well too of course. I know some berate him on here, but I find him very witty, very clever with words. I shall be happy to see him back and in good health.
Agreed
A tremendous piece from a genuine talent . A piece that did not fail to move and for me absolved previous self-indulgent pieces.
Many in racing wish you the best in what will be a difficult journey and I look forward to shaking your hand at the Festival
"It is a moment probably understood by ageing boxers past their prime. Deep into a bruising battle in which … blah blah blah …."
Jeez, he’s sobered up and he’s still talking pish?
"I do solemnly swear not to become a bore about it"
Become a bore? Too late for that.
Down is a poor writer who’s insistence on using 30 words to say what could be better said in 10 is self-indulgence rather than eloquence or "poetry".
There have been many talented celtic writers who have been drunks and, no doubt, Down has felt a kinship with them when he’s been necking the drink.
However, they could write and he can’t.
And, now that he’s sober, he’s going to have to face the cold, hard fact that he was never part of that tradition, just a faker.
I genuinely wish him good luck in his battle with the booze, but I expect he won’t be able to accept the reality that he’s just a bad and tediously self-indulgent writer.
Steve
A necessary piece of public self-flagellation and it reflects great credit on him. Whilst I have long tended to find his wrting a tad too romantic, melencholic and self-indulgent (the nature of the man I guess), in his pomp he did produce some splendidly wrought, if florid, prose.
A tortuous journey awaits on the long road back to health from what appears to be – from the loss of blood references – incipient liver cirrhosis and I wish the likeable cove all the very best.
There but for the grace of God…
With that dreadfully sad case where the ex labour MP Fiona Jones drank herself to death at the age of 49 last week fresh in the mind, you have to feel a lot of sympathy for AD and his battle
Not my favourite journalist (the above piece illustrates why) but having briefly met him, he appeared to be a genuinely nice guy
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