AA Gillitude

[marycrawford]

So apparently the Times and the Sunday Times are going to charge money for being read online - a quid a day or two quid for a week's access. Best of luck with that, fellows, and let me know when you can't hack it anymore. I give you about eight months.

Meanwhile, I want to point you to the one bit of content I do read on the Sunday Times website: AA Gill. That's his name. He reviews stuff: restaurants, TV programmes, the occasional book or travel destination. But it is almost immaterial what his actual topic is, and quite often you are halfway down the page before you find out.

I read his restaurant reviews even though he reviews places in London, and I don't live there, and when I do go there I wouldn't go to those places. I've rarely seen any of the television programmes he reviews, and when I have I don't agree with him. In fact I barely ever agree with him on anything. None of that matters. The point is: go there now, before they start charging money for the privilege, if you want to read some of the best and quirkiest journalistic talent around, purely for the sake of the writing.

This is AA Gill in the Maledives:

"Half the guests are Russian, paunchy and determined men with defensive eyes, aggressive hair and holiday clothes that have been bought by assistants who don’t like them. Most of them have lady friends whose second names they haven’t yet grasped. These girls undulate in slicing and engorged bikinis, and survey through predator glasses their new partners and everyone else in the way that undertakers look at old people."

This is AA Gill reviewing a restaurant (no, really):

"(...) reading to children is a constant battle against heckling. So I’ve taken to picking up magazines and making up stories. A copy of Playboy is a good place to start. This is a story about a lot of mummies who have lost all their clothes. This is Debbie. She’s looking for her clothes in the bed. And Shawnee is looking for her clothes on the beach. Yes, maybe she’s got her pyjamas in her boobies. Hello! is also good for children’s stories. This is the ugly toad the fairy turned into a prince. Look at his greasy hair. He’s marrying the Queen of the Vampires, and those are her bridesmaids, Lunch, Dinner and Tea, and the guests are the Troll Cannibal and the Witch of Farts, and there’s the Evil Dwarf, and that one’s Simon Cowell."

And here's another restaurant review, which I hold especially dear because it's the first time I've ever seen anyone use Polari in a restaurant review, or in any kind of newspaper prose:

"I was a plongeur and commis chef here, and learnt the full Orwellian squalor of a pre-Conran West End kitchen. I regularly took salad out of the bin when we ran out. I remember that the whole kitchen gobbed into the vichyssoise of a pair of arch pooves who’d been rude to the waitress. I was a teenager with a bona eke and fit lallies, and regularly had beige door johnnies waiting to ply me with a little drinky-winky. I’d have to slip down the fire escape, which isn’t a euphemism. Happy days."