Paul Thomas: Fear and loathing in a railway carriage

Let us now praise famous men, sadly no longer with us.

Hunter S. Thompson went out with a bang this week. Six months to the day after he committed suicide, family and friends gathered at his Colorado ranch to see his ashes blasted out of a cannon.

It was a fitting send-off for the self-styled outlaw journalist and desperate Southern gentleman who loved controlled explosions almost as much as he loved drugs and booze.

It was fitting, too, that movie star Johnny Depp picked up the tab for the pyrotechnics.

A lifelong exponent of the mind-boggling expenses claim, Thompson had more fun with other people's money than Ronnie Biggs.

In this day and age, notoriety is just a sub-category of celebrity. Despite positioning himself as an outsider, Thompson always had one foot in the scene, and in latter years both his famously decadent lifestyle and once-incendiary work lost their shock value. But there was a time.

In the early 1980s I re-read Thompson's masterpiece Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas on a train from Edinburgh to London. I couldn't stop laughing.

Private jokes can be profoundly irritating and I soon attracted glacial looks from the woman across the aisle, as stylish an example of mid-life Euro-chic as ever walked a poodle down the Champs Elysee.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of her and she asked, in attractively accented English, to see what all the fuss was about.

The garish orange and red cover with the confronting Ralph Steadman cartoon might have persuaded a less sophisticated individual that this probably wasn't a good idea.

I don't know which passage her eye alighted on, but the thing about Fear And Loathing is that virtually every page contains a vivid description of lunatic, degenerate and often criminal behaviour.

Her eyes bulged. Her shapely mouth squirmed with revulsion. She shut the book and returned it, as if discarding a well-smeared tissue.

Darting me a look full of fear and loathing, she moved to the far end of the carriage.

Thompson, I felt, would have enjoyed the moment.

I interviewed David Lange once, in 1977. I was a journalism student at Auckland Technical Institute and he was the Labour candidate in the upcoming Mangere by-election.

His reputation preceded him - I'd heard him described as a saint by lawyers not given to dewy-eyed admiration of anyone but themselves - and I'd seen him around town.

He was an extraordinary sight in those days with his cherubic features, mountainous bulk, milk bottle glasses and long, lank hair - Billy Bunter crossed with a mad professor.

He didn't give the impression of being wildly excited about his forthcoming political career, preferring to reminisce about his time in London.

Interestingly, given his later litigiousness, he seemed fascinated by the shadowy figure of Lord Goodman, a high-powered lawyer and political fixer who'd been widely regarded as the power behind the throne during Harold Wilson's prime ministership and who was feared and loathed by the media for his prowess in defamation proceedings.

Perhaps it would be overdoing the hindsight to say that even then Lange had an air of melancholy, but I came away knowing I'd met a future Prime Minister.

Although neither would have appreciated the juxtaposition, he and Robert Muldoon are by some distance the most remarkable and interesting politicians in our recent history.

I met Muldoon 10 years later. In my role as features editor of the yet-to-be-launched Auckland Sun, I visited him at home in Chatswood to try to enlist him as a book reviewer.

I began my pitch with an earnest assurance that, while a tabloid, the Auckland Sun would bear no resemblance to its British namesake renowned for mega-breasted page three girls and a robust disregard for conventional notions of newsworthiness. ("Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" must surely be the most arresting front page headline of all time.)

Muldoon cut me off with his sinister chuckle. "You needn't worry about that," he said. "I write a column for Truth."

He proved to be an editor's dream, providing good, clean copy on time and exactly to length.

A high-flying All Blacks team playing the Springboks on their home turf are rattled by in-your-face defence that seems to defy the offside law.

A Springbok lock smashes the All Black halfback in a dubious tackle, leaving him dazed and disoriented. Before he's replaced, the halfback makes a mistake which gifts the Springboks a try.

The left-footed Springbok fullback knocks over a few kicks and they seal victory with an intercept try.

For rugby followers of a certain age, Cape Town 2005 was, in baseball legend Yogi Berra's famous tautology, "deja vu all over again".

Flashback to Pretoria, 1970: crash-tackling centre Joggie Jansen hammers the All Blacks behind the advantage line; Frik Du Preez poleaxes Chris Laidlaw; Syd Nomis grabs an intercept try; Ian McCallum kicks the goals. The All Blacks lose.

In the words of the Shirley Bassey song, it's all just a little bit of history repeating. The Boks are back and playing for keeps. The All Blacks need to be very aware that they aren't playing tiddlywinks.