jeff porter

Although I knew Ian for thirty years I wouldn't say I knew him well. There was an evasive or fugitive or maybe just plain shy side to his nature which made privacy important to him. As students together in the high political fervour of the 1970s we had reason enough, as it seemed to us, to hope that the world was becoming a better place for ordinary folk, more just, more forgiving, more generous towards the underdog, a place more obviously in line with Reason's apparently increased sway in the affairs of men. As students, too, we probably thought we were more important than we were, more likely to change the shape of history than other folk, and we probably felt that we had something important to say to people. Of course we were just deluding ourselves.

Since then I saw Ian on and off. He went into teaching and then drugs work. I went into crime. We met up now and then for drinks. And this is all there was to it, really.

When I heard that Ian was ill I wasn't surprised. His drinking had been regular and at times prolonged. He had always smoked. He rarely did any exercise. His eating habits were fairly poor. On top of an early penchant for the white stuff ( is it white?) this was probably more than a middling constitution could be expected to bear. And so he left us sooner than he should.

Towards the end, as it seemed to me, he was no more than content to be surrounded by a flock of friends and colleagues and admirers. Prior to that, and like most of us, he was apt to think it was vitally important that he was liked. In fact I had the sense at times that he never really felt liked enough. There is nothing much we can do about people who think like that. In Ian's case I suspect it was what had driven him in the first place to 'improve' himself and to develop those skills and talents by which we will always now remember him - his love of and facility with books, his racy and populist writing style, his delight in teaching and in telling a story.

For my own part it was always the less developed or completely undeveloped aspects of Ian's nature which I treasured most. He never seemed to me to have learned how to feel at ease in or at one with the world. He never really seemed to have come to terms with it. Neither did I. He held back from it to some extent, as though seeking to maintain some scruple or other that he felt endangered by too enthusiastic or too firm an embrace. I found this reassuring. Not that his embrace of life was always that half-hearted. In some ways he threw himself into life with more energy and determination than made much sense for a man as shy and fragile as he was, and someone as ambivalent towards it. When it came to his children, for example, I believe he laboured as long and as hard as any man I have ever met to do the right thing by them. Looking at them now I think we can safely say he succeeded. But he never really understood or was able to make much of the benefits of a settled and regular family life. I think he felt his freedom threatened by it. I must have moved his furniture and books and assorted ornaments in and out of half a dozen would-be scenes of domestic bliss. He was never quite at home in any of them.

A curious mixture of things, then, this reformer, this preacher, this would-be maker of a better world. A product of ambitious times he was not himself ambitious in the ordinary sense. A central core of old-style working class modesty kept him anchored. At times the rough and ready way he spoke and dressed and presented himself was more tramp than scholar. And yet his dog-eared pouch of tobacco and Rizlas and assorted plastic lighters (three for £1) was as likely as not jammed up in his rucksack next to the costly jumble of high tech paraphernalia (computers and pagers and mobile phones) without which modern communicators and decision-makers would doubtless be lost.

And what was it this rumpled figure with the larger than life-sized head and bandy legs felt not just able but bound to communicate? The message that users of drugs are still citizens and fellow men and are entitled therefore to the same rights as the rest of us. A far cry this perhaps from the revolutionary slogans of the 1970s in response to which Rhodes Boyson and Thatcher had closed down higher education in any true sense and replaced it with business studies. But the message still contained enough implied disdain for governments and their muddled attempts at protecting the rights of minorities to make preaching it a political act. The question which Ian and I discussed more often than we should, perhaps, was whether this political act really amounted to anything very much. As it seemed to me it was not much more than a gesture. Nothing changed as a result of it. Minorities continued to be treated badly. Users of drugs continued to be regarded as hell bent on their own destruction and therefore less entitled to rights shared by the rest of us. But while things got not much better for the hapless user, things got very much better for a growing army of ‘consultants’ and ‘treatment’ personnel and ‘workshop’ organizers and ‘conference’ goers whose mortgages were steadily being paid off out of public funding for a plethora of drugs-related ‘studies’ and ‘initiatives’.

The more I challenged the motives of these ‘gesture makers’, as I called them, the harder it got for the pair of us to see eye to eye. My feeling is that over the years Ian’s confidence in what he was doing became undermined by the stance that folk like me were taking. Others, made of sterner stuff, perhaps, just shrugged their shoulders and soldiered on in the lucrative ‘treatment and prevention business’ regardless. But for Ian this became, I think, an issue. I feel it troubled him. He became depressed. As usual he responded by increasing the supply of alcohol and nicotine to a body increasingly losing its resistance to both. By the time he reached retirement from the CDT in Trafford he was a sick man. It was only a question of time before a long career of abuse and addiction and unhealthy practices brought him down. But he did go down and he went down all too quickly.

When the storm came Ian barely flinched, however, as it seemed to me. His body shrank to nothing. His humour had long since gone, of course, as any person's would have. Then his mind went, too, that craggy fortress nothing ever seemed to threaten in earlier crises. There was much resistance, much skirmishing, much ebb and flow of that vital light. But the shadows closed in round it finally and irrevocably quite some time before he died. As I dwell upon this now I am at a loss to describe what he reminded me of in those final days: some ancient sage, perhaps, some stoic left with nothing of the fine array of faculties and powers that were once his. Strangely he never whined about the loss of these essential possessions. In fact he never whined at all. He was beaten. He could see that. We could see that. But he wasn't disgraced. The frailty of his wasted body shocked us all. And yet, miracle of miracles, at the very end, when he was left with nothing, no hope, no strength, no means of speech, there was something very manly about him, I thought. I hadn't really noticed that in him hitherto. But there it was now. It was utterly strange, yet undeniable. Somehow, and against all odds, and in the least auspicious of circumstances, Ian had, for me at any rate, somehow and suddenly become a man.