With or without me

It’s over. Terminated. The end of a beautiful friendship. From this day on, Sam Snort will never again sit down and have a pint with… Sam Snort.

Yes, it’s finally happened. Having fallen out with every one I’ve ever known, I have finally fallen out with myself. I may be a fundamentally decent man but I’ve written a shite book, failed to back myself up in the ensuing controversy and now the time has come to say – enough is enough.

I simply can’t go on knowing that I may say something I profoundly believe in one minute and then find that I have an overwhelming urge to completely contradict myself the next. No one can imagine the sheer nerve-wracking terror of living every second of every day with the possibility that I might suddenly reach around and stab myself in the back. The bottom line for Sam Snort is that I am either with myself or against myself. I can’t be both. (Oh yes I can).

Hateful Things

Fans of mine will know that this terminal parting of the ways has been a long time coming. Sam Snort isn’t the first person to fall out with Sam Snort but he is most certainly the last.

But I wouldn’t call what has happened a tragedy. A tragedy is when a big punt fails to come up at Leopardstown. All friendships have their ups and downs and are tested in times of trouble but this is clearly the end for me and myself.

I won’t miss myself either, even though I think nobody did more to back me in the past than myself. Especially when the going got rough. I well recall a time when Sam Snort was the most vilified man in the country, even more so than Lance Turnpike, lead singer with southern boogiemeisters Foghat, and whose wonderful autobiography M**********r is available from all good record shops now.

As I say, Sam was public enemy number one back way back when. People wrote hateful things about him. And alone I went out to bat for him, year after year, in my bare feet, although I didn’t have a bob or a gig or even, by the sound of things, an old pair of open-toe sandals. Yet I went out and said, ‘I am a good guy, I am a great rock journalist, leave me alone.’

And what happens now? Suddenly, I’m left without a friend in the world and all because I publicly accused myself of breaking my wife’s leg in a domestic incident long ago. Next thing I know, my wife, who I haven’t heard from in years, turns up somewhere in Scotland to say that it was only a sprained ankle and, anyway, she wasn’t even my wife at the time.

Then, while I’m still reeling from that betrayal, I turn viciously on myself and, in an entirely unprovoked attack, announce that it had merely been a kitchen accident with absolutely no malice aforethought, and that I don’t know why I’m dragging myself into all this now except out of a desperate desire to sell a few books and placate a few bookies.

Which brings me back to Lance Turnpike, by contrast to myself, a magnificent human being, someone who privately donates generously to charity, a giver, a lover, a real man in bad, bad world.

Bad Man

Lance is all those things and more – at least until such time as I fall out with him. Which, just as night follows day – or, if you’re me, night follows night – I surely will. And then I’ll be forced to attack him for selling his life story to some old hack for cheap headlines and money in the bank. At that point he will become, like me, a spoofer, an imposter, a bad man in a real, real world.

Meantime, following medical advice I am going into hospital tomorrow for a hip operation. I’m having the damaged septum in my nose replaced and you can’t get any more hip than that, eh?

After that, I can only hope I rot in hell.

Your ever lovin’ Samuel J. Snort Esq