Hitchens for a Fight

We're lucky in Hay. The frequent late-night carousing and cursing on just about any of our streets might not be intellectually polemical in origin, possibly not to cultured taste, but it's free and unticketed. I'll concede that the anticipation of an infrequent brawl doesn't indicate a sane outlook, but there are some things which appear to have less sense. One of those is queuing to provoke Christopher Hitchens into swearing at you under canvas, in earshot of hordes of his acolytes. That sounds to me like an almost indescribably baroque perversion, like paying to be whipped by the squire while his chums from the Hellfire Club (modern incarnation, immoveable feast) and assorted media sponsors lay bare your wheals to a wider public. Some people will do almost anything for money, and some people, often unaccountably, will do almost anything to give it away.