AA Gill

One of the great pleasures of my week is lying down on our (gone) off cream carpet on a Sunday afternoon and opening up the Style magazine of the Sunday  Times. After glancing surreptitiously at the Celebrity Sex Clinic column to keep up to date with the literate comings and goings of the rich and famous, it is onwards yet onwards past the 'my husband is a lesbian and i love it' articles and latest news from the catwalks of Europe to AA Gill's restaurant review. By now I have normally also digested the weekly emission of bile from Michael Winner in Winner's dinner. While this is out and proud exercise in vulgarity sustained only by an entertainingly gargantuan ego, AA Gill is all about sophistication and the joy of words. While no doubt he is too  clever by half and someone a little too familiar with condescension, he is my favourite writer by a mile. Every column includes such exotic verbiage that one comes away inspired to read a dictionary. Gill really writes about nothing much at all but so wondrously and with such inconsequence which makes the language sparkle even more. Take this from this week about seeing Wagner's ring cycle:

One of the little Vorspiel highlights is to stand in the corridor and enjoy the Wagnerian dash – more a sprightly trudge – to the lavatories as the first bell rings. Everyone knows that this is a pelvic-floor clencher, and most of the audience is of an age where the elastic is a bit frayed. Towards the end of the second act, you can feel the drip, drip, drip of anxiety, the quivering sphincter of doubt. It’s like being on the motorway and having the empty light flash on, except it’s the opposite. They ought to have those wire cages like they do at airports for hand luggage: you’re not allowed on board if your bladder is fuller than this.

What I would give to write with such a dripping pen!

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