This year has seen a slew of departed musicians, actors and entertainers. I previously blogged about one of them: Jackie Collins.
Adding to these talents, is someone else who courted controversy, the journalist AA Gill, who died aged 62, less than a month after revealing he was seriously ill with cancer in his Sunday Times column. His review of Fucina last month starts, ‘That’s it. Enough already. I have officially, unequivocally, finally, terminally, without remission and leave of appeal, passed the apex of…’ It’s now clear what he’s referring to, but he finished the sentence with ‘sharing plates’.
Whether you liked or disliked what AA Gill wrote, there’s no denying his talent. It was nearly always provocative and loaded with such witty, original similes that I’d often read aloud sections of his reviews to whoever was in earshot.
He could be scathing about people (describing vegetarians – such as myself – as ‘people who get pleasure from not eating things’, for example) and places (he once described Wimbledon as ‘one of those places that make you want to marry a cucumber’). He always picked his own restaurants (rather than the PRs’), paid for his meals (on company credit cards) and never took notes.
He also spoke a lot of sense. On the Brexit vote, he said: ‘We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty.’
As The Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens put it succinctly, ‘He was the heart and soul of the paper. His wit was incomparable, his writing was dazzling and fearless, his intelligence was matched by compassion. Adrian was a giant among journalists. He was also our friend. We will miss him.’
If you would like to stay up to date with WLG’s blog, subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter.
