The minor tragedy of not being there

A rainy day in London town and I was browsing through the latest edition of The Oldie (as you do when you’re past your threescoreandten).

I came across a lovely piece by John Sweeney headlined “Fortune’s Fool” in which he reminisced about stories reporters missed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Coping - or, in my case, not coping - with the minor tragedy of not being there,” he agonised, “is one of my very worst character failings.”

He recalled, for example, attending an editorial conference at The Observer when the allied invasion of Saddam’s Iraq was announced.

“If memory serves,” he went on, “Donald Trelford said: ‘This is a historic moment,’ at which Michael Ignatieff piped up: ‘We should all remember this occasion, and where we are.’ To which I replied, bleakly: ‘Battersea.’”

My forlorn answer to a similar announcement - the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War - would have been “The Hoop and Grapes”.

I was with The AP in 1973 and, as former News Editor of its Israel bureau, on its stand-by list to cover the next crisis in the Middle East. I had just missed the Six Day War in 1967, although I covered the immediate aftermath, and couldn’t wait for the next conflagration.

In October 1973 I quit to join Reuters, envisaging greater opportunity. The war broke out a week after I handed in my notice and thereby removed myself from the list of first, or any, AP responders.

I will never forget standing at the bar of the Hoop, staring at the TV news, willing it all to be a false alarm as pictures streamed in of tanks on the Golan and my mates headed for Heathrow. My grin was well and truly chagged.

Although I subsequently enjoyed a terrific career at Reuters, which of course would never have happened had I boarded a plane for Israel that day, the memory of the one that got away remains an indelible file amongst the fading cells of my mental data bank.

As Sweeney concluded: “All of this makes me realise that the great game of life is far more like the TV cartoon Wacky Races than, say, Abba’s melancholy tribute to success The Winner Takes All, and nowhere more so than in the frantic, spasm-rich heh-nonny-no world of journalism.

“As that wise old fool King Lear said: ‘Fortune, good night. Smile once more. Turn thy wheel.’” ■