Lock up your daughters and hide your baboons: A.A. Gill’s in town
Restaurant critic A.A. Gill is one of my favourite writers in the Times – though he’s more than merely a restaurant critic. He’s also one of the paper’s television critics and more general columnists and feature writers.
He really is a very good writer, with – as the blurbs have it – an ‘acerbic wit.’ (Blurb & sports writers truly are the sons and daughters of Homer and his ‘rosy-fingered dawn.’)
Anyway, Gill got himself in a bit of trouble, last week, when he wrote in one of his columns that, while in Africa, he had shot & killed a baboon.
The uproar was as predictable as it was fun – and I’m sure Gill enjoyed every pre-planned minute of it. He’s an intelligent man who, among other things, gets paid to comment on popular culture, so he was obviously aware of the fact that, these days, in Britain, admitting to shooting a primate will get you more rabid hate mail than if you were caught fucking your neighbour’s dog (or underage daughter.)
I’m sure Gill had a lot of fun contemplating the millions of apoplectic readers, who’d just finished his ‘I shot a baboon in Africa, last Wednesday, just after lunch. Shot it dead,’ confessional column.
Me, well…
…while I kind of like my neighbours’ cat (but not in that way…)
…and they don’t have a daughter…
…and I’ve never shot or eaten a baboon…
…I’d still be willing to ignore these and any other of A.A. Gill’s trespasses, as long as he produces lines as the one he wrote in his last column. He wrote this about a chef (whom he didn’t shoot.)
Enjoy:
“He has the naturally relaxed, unclenched, unconcerned demeanour of a New Orleans funeral band.”
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