My Natural History by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes [Simon Barnes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907595790
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 2011-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

A few years after my return to England, the wedding, the honeymoon and the marsh harrier, I was, if I might be so immodest, a success. At least, modest aims had been immodestly realised. I was a sports columnist for The Times, I travelled to far places to write stories, I had won a journalistic award, I had published a couple of books. What more could anyone want?

Cind and I were now living in a Victorian terraced house built on the roof of a railway tunnel at the extreme northern tip of London – clinging onto town by a whisker – and she was working as an actress when the work came in. Things were going well, and there was plenty more still to be done, more than enough to give savour to life.

It was January and I had a trip before me. Its main purpose was to cover the Super Bowl, the final game of the American football season. It was to take place in San Diego, and I had been told a fine thing about that town, something that lit up the prospect of the entire trip. I was also to go on from San Diego to Los Angeles to spend a few days at the racetrack doing some horsey stories; but before that I had to go to Atlantic City to cover some boxing. Mike Tyson was to fight Larry Holmes for the heavyweight championship of the world.

I can only assume that the reason for my presence in Atlantic City was economy, for this was a drastic measure. Certainly, the boxing correspondent was far from pleased, but he showed no signs of blaming me for stealing his trip. He knew I hated boxing. I had covered a fight in Las Vegas, in the belief that every sportswriter must do so at least once, and I had loathed every inch of the place and every nuance of the event. I had also written fairly unapologetically in favour of the abolition of boxing. I was in no mood to start enjoying myself, then.

Atlantic City was vile, without any of the surrealism that – sometimes for minutes at a time – redeems Vegas from itself. Atlantic City was Las Vegas without the charm and sophistication; Las Vegas with all the subtlety and intellectual challenge removed; Las Vegas without the chance of escape. I walked endlessly along the winter boardwalk to get away from the claustrophobia of the gambling halls, past the same grey Atlantic that rolls past England, squadrons of ring-billed and herring gulls wheeling and squabbling around my head, marching through the short days before twilight forced me to return to the hotel, the way to my room taking me not-at-all beguilingly past serried ranks of slot machines and gaming tables, back in the land where there is no night and no day.

I can’t say I handled myself well in Atlantic City. I drank copiously with kind and generous colleagues in the bar known as the Irish bar, a

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