Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

Without wishing to make light of the writer/commentators death it has to be said that there is something wonderfully ironic about the timing of his death, coming as it does in the middle of wonga festival - the time when we are easily parted from our cash and credit cards all in the name of a religious festival.

Hitchens was a writer who polarised opinion, I've seen him described over the past twenty four hours as everything from a mediocre writer to a self publicising demi-god and the greatest ever English essayist - the truth is somewhere among those epitaphs. Enter any online debate and you will be labelled, either left, right, centre or a variant on those three, every nuance of your public self is commented on, it always helps your enemies if you can be pigeon holed because then, should they run out of any reasonable counter argument, they can fall back on words like 'typical leftie' or 'typical Guardian middle class, woolly liberal thinking', it's as if freedom of expression has become a saleable commodity and you can only be defined by a set of reference points. Of course the confusion comes when you have the same opinion on something as somebody who was previously your enemy - at least in their minds, for the most part online debate ends when the point has been flogged to within an inch of its life and then flogged again but threads of messageboards can go on for weeks beyond their natural life.

Hitchens has been called 'left wing', he himself referred to his political beliefs as 'Trotsky-Marxist' more than forty years ago, he was also described as a liberal. I think that Hitchens was beyond labels, and I don't mean that in a 'we're not worthy way' I think he was a clever man, a brilliant writer and somebody who constantly revisited his beliefs and thoughts and adjusted them accordingly. He was inconsistent in his writing and his outpourings and isn't that the way we should all be?

"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life,"  is a much better quote to remember Muhammad Ali by than any 'float like a butterfly sting like a bee' line as far as I'm concerned. There's something refreshing, mentally stimulating about changing your mind when presented with new evidence, isn't there?

I admired Hitchens for his commitment to his own cause, for daring to say in writing and on stage, television or radio what he thought. he didn't follow a particular doctrine, poltical line or school of thought. He was his own man and for that we can all be grateful because whilst he was writing the over sanitised, shake n' vac tmedia world was a better place.