A A Gill

AA Gill was a great writer and in my view, a great human being. At the time of his death, obituaries focused on his shooting of a baboon, his criticism of Clare Balding, the Welsh, the Isle of Man and Mary Beard. But there was also the compassion, the empathy and the writing!

Some great quotes collected here:

https://doronklemer.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/42-a-a-gill-is-away/

this definition of the evolution of Fidel Castro’s communist stronghold:

“Forty years later, Cuba is famous for failed politics, syncopated music, immoral women and cigars, and if an island could be a person, then Cuba would be Bill Clinton…”

Or how about this unshakeable image from Tanzania:

“Hippos look and sound like the House of Commons. Fat, self-satisfied gents with patronizing smirks and fierce pink short-sighted eyes in wrinkled gray suits going ‘haw-haw’ and telling each other dirty jokes…”

And as both a traveler, and a potential travel writer, these two pearls of wisdom came in the introduction:

“One of the most important reasons to travel is to learn to be a foreigner…”

“I’m a reluctant travel writer. I don’t read other people’s travel writing. I can never get over the feeling that I’m subsidizing someone else’s holiday…”

A.A.Gill on MONTE CARLO:

“It’s time to go. It was time to go before I got here…”

“…a family that befitted Monaco. A trailer-trash aristocracy. A princeling who was so characterless he’d get off in a police line-up of one…”

on GERMANY (specifically, the newly built Reichstag building):

“Norman Foster is having a party to hand over his beautiful re-creation to the city. It’s very impressive, with its glass dome and mirrored funnel for extracting all the hot air of German irregular verbs…”

on ARGENTINA:

“Patagonia is unfeasibly beautiful and vast. The beauty never lets up, it is like ocular tinnitus, a repetitive deafening of the eye…”

on CUBA:

“There’s music and mess and clots of policemen and 1950’s cars and posters of Che. It’s Che that really does it, really reminds you that this is the last untidied student bedroom in the world…”

on being asked to direct a movie

“An American computer company wanted to advertise the power of the Internet by listing the top ten most popular sites. It gave up, because all of them were porn. In fact, the top twenty sites are all porn with the singular exception of the Mormons’ Doomsday Census…”

on CALIFORNIA:

“Ask anyone who lives here what the best thing about LA is and the answer is invariably valet parking. And that tells you about everything you need to know about LA…”

on INDIA (a fittingly wide-ranging report, which staggered from the humorously scatological to the fascinatingly factual to the deeply thought-provoking):

“…farting in India is playing Raj roulette with the linen…”

“There are more beggars in Soho than there are in Bombay…”

“India is a poor place, but only in economic terms. On any other scale you care to think of, it’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice…if we measure wealth in terms of any of the things that really matter – family, spirituality, manners, inquisitiveness, inventiveness, dexterity, culture, history and food – then India would be hosting the next G7 conference and sending charity workers to California…”

on ETHIOPIA

“I try to make some sense out of the royal family, but it’s like juggling mud…”

on UGANDA (mostly consisting of a damning indictment of Big Pharma):

“Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that you have to take malaria pills to go to places where the population doesn’t take them? Or that you you get injections for yellow fever, cholera, typhus and hepatitis? None of the locals are immune to these things. They just suffer them…?

“Europeans who have grown up with American films, music and soda imagine they know who and what America is. Put that the other way round and consider what you’d know about France based solely on French TV and pop music. There is French TV by the way, just nobody watches it – not even the French…”

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On neighbours:

“For the Scots, as for so many countries with powerful neighbours, history is something that’s done to you. For the English, it’s something you do to others…”

and from here https://doronklemer.wordpress.com/2013/08/15/78-previous-convictions-a-a-gill/

Casual racism:

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“…being Italian – and therefore more superstitious than a convention of clairvoyants in a ladder factory…”

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On journalists in Haiti:

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“Over dinner on the veranda, the photographers commiserate with Gigi over her lost film. They compare tear-gas vintages: not as peppery as Israel 2000, but with a stronger choking aftertaste than Serbia ’98…”

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On why Guatemala is better than Mexico:

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“Where the Aztecs are all threats and instructions, the Maya are all observations and questions…”

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brutal Guatemalan history

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“Guatemala suffered an intractable civil war that started in 1960, instigated by the CIA on behalf of American fruit companies. Thirty years later, nobody could remember what it was they were fighting about, so they decided to give elections a go…”

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On Antigua, Guatemala,

“…there are no road signs, in any language, and indeed often not much road either…”

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“Outside in the courtyard, a drunk with rheumy eyes and an idiot’s grin tries to sell us good luck: he doesn’t look as if he has much stock…”

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On Vietnam:

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“The president’s palace is now a half-hearted museum, kept as it was left – a perfect example not just of the banality of despotism but of the political law that military dictators have taste in inverse proportion to their power…”

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On Oman:

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“Travel should question, not confirm. It should excite, not relax…”

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The Greek island of Kos welcomes migrants. The plane from Gatwick is full of them. For Brits, it’s a place to enjoy the fruits of their professional provincial labours, a second home in the sun for folk who think Spain too common but can’t afford the Caribbean.

I have noticed that, right across Europe, the refugees bring out either the very best in civilians or the very worst in people in uniform.

And then there was a boat. Two boats came and they saw us and went away. One sailed right round us and went away. How could someone do that?’ He pauses and looks at me for an answer, as if it might be a European habit. I don’t tell him that it is. The identity of these boats is a mystery. There will be an inquiry, but sailors in the Mediterranean are instructed not to stop for refugee boats. There was no call, no message to the coastguard. Mohammed was finally pulled from the sea by a local fisherman. He needs to find the man to thank him.

The one thing the refugees and the Europeans agree on is that Europe is a place of freedom, fairness and safety. It turns out that one of us is ­mistaken and the other is lying.

You can read the whole article here https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/syrian-refugees-seek-a-better-life-in-europe-but-will-they-find-it/news-story/60711e7dd3bd9eb57a91b4a83c175b92

On bringing up his children:

I’ve always encouraged my children to be inquisitive, to get out there, to see the world. We only pass this way once, I tell them, this globe is where you live, not just this corner of this one city. See your birthright, meet the neighbours, don’t just leave your travelling to the TV and glossy magazines. There’ve always been maps in their rooms and travellers’ tales on their bookshelves.

I think in the First World we have the illusion of choice and sophistication, whereas in fact the range of flavours and textures we consume for pleasure is getting smaller and fewer: we’re down to dumbly bold and inoffensively bland. So many things have single, polite flavours; we’re cutting out the complex and the strange.

Gill could never be accused of being inoffensively bland, but he examined himself as ruthlessly as the rest of the world.

On choosing a last meal in the event of execution:

Obviously, junk food doesn’t necessarily make a drug-addled premeditated murderer, but it’s an inescapable truth that with every last meal ordered at all executions over three years, not one of them was what you’d call home-cooked. If your last supper includes something that isn’t fried or you need to eat with a knife and fork and it doesn’t come with ketchup or barbecue sauce or chilli, then it’s almost certain you won’t ever be asked to make the choice for real. Asking for a napkin to go with that would probably be grounds for a retrial. Bad food doesn’t lead to bad lives, but rotten lives eat rotten dinners.

I slumped into a seat. There was a pamphlet about fair trade, and how Starbucks paid some Nicaraguan Sancho a reasonable amount for his coffee so that he now had a mule to go with his thirteen children, leaky roof and fifteen coffee bushes. It made not screwing the little no-hope wetback into penury sound like the most astonishing act of charitable benevolence. And they just had to print a pamphlet about it, so we all know the sort of selfless, munificent, group-hug people we’re dealing with.

Gill was a metrosexual and a Christian:

But Kierkegaard is Denmark’s real hero, and far more typically Danish. He was the bloke who pointed out ‘the leap of faith’, that junction where you have to step off the rational pavement of provable fact into the motorway of belief. He says that to have faith you must also have doubt, that doubt is the natural and inescapable condition of faith. To have belief without doubt is not devout, it’s being a credulous cretin.

The high point of my journeys among the country house hotels was once being offered a complimentary labrador for my postprandial walk down to the lake.

Lightly expressed anger at the iniquities of the world:

Bahr al Ghazal is a state twice the size of France with a population of perhaps less than a million, but no one’s counting.

And when they are all done, the local mummy’s boys get into their Ferraris and zoom and pretend. It’s as pathetic as taking your own football to a Cup Final.

And real anger at those who abuse and compassion who those who have been abused:

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA): the oldest and most conceivably sadistic terrorist group in Africa. When I first came across them a decade ago in northern Uganda, they were known as the Rebels Without a Cause because no one who had met them had lived long enough to discover what it was they wanted. Driven out of their native Uganda, they have bled into the ungoverned badlands where Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic meet: these are three remedially dysfunctional nations.

She was in the fields with her husband, the LRA came out of the bush and beat him to death in front of her; she knelt on the ground cradling him and they came for her with a machete. But the officer said no, not the machete, not the gun. ‘He asked, did I want to live or die? I was crying, holding my husband. “Kill me,” I said. He was angry and said, “You’re mocking us,” so they took a razor and cut off my mouth.’ She draws her finger around the lump of scar. ‘It fell in my lap like a doughnut.’ What? ‘It fell in my lap like a doughnut. I went to pick it up. They cut my mouth then each side, cheek to ear. “Go and tell the soldiers,” they said. “Tell them to come and get your husband.”

And more compassion:

After Generation 66, they showed Cathy Come Home, one of the most important and influential TV programmes of all time. I hadn’t seen it since 1966, so I sat tensely waiting to be disappointed. But from the first shot I was again enthralled. It is still brilliant, perhaps even more gripping and compelling than I remembered. The montaging of real footage with the story of this young family trying to find a home; the voiceover delivering dry political and economic fact; the tight, intimate camerawork; the naturalistic script – still unspeakably moving.

On love:

The first lesson of being a parent, of being a man, is that you have no idea of what love is, or like, or for. That urgent, delicious groin-magnet feeling that you understand as being love is the tease, the taster, the glimpse – it is a warm bath compared to the riptide of the real thing. And that arrives with fatherhood. Up until then you’ve just been paddling in love. Nobody ever tells you this, nobody ever explains that you can’t feel the bottom, that you drown in the stuff. Other men never mention that love, which is remiss of us, and our dads never tell us, never really tell us. You can write ‘love you’ on a birthday card, whisper love to a sleeping tousled head, but to explain to an adolescent, a teenager, that terrifyingly transcendent fundamental act of nature that is loving your children, is too difficult and choking. But you should know, you should be aware, that you can’t be prepared for it, nothing prepares you. But you shouldn’t be surprised. The funny and sad thing is that the time when it’s easiest to say it, when there is the greatest paternal emotion, when it’s most obvious and strong, you never remember. Those first years when you can’t blow your own nose, when your father picked you up and rocked you and watched you speechlessly as you slept, are blank. Later, as you grow up, the relationship is muddled with practicality, with the resentment and the accidents, with the dull rigmarole of discipline and bedtimes and homework, inappropriate behaviour, tantrums and tiredness. And that’s what you know of your childhood. You remember dodging through it. But there were four scant years when you slept in an ocean of love and your father never forgets and it never goes away and it will come to you. And you realise the greatest design fault of human beings is that they don’t remember their childhood and you can’t recall their first words or first steps – the first time they tasted chocolate or falling asleep on their father’s shoulders in dark kitchens.

On his dyslexia:

It was only afterwards that I wondered if perhaps, after so many years of punishing my inability to understand, they might have thought of some alternative to taking away the only morning I had to myself. In retrospect there was a prophetic encounter. I loved history. It was taught by a man who always gave me low marks for the work I struggled over at the expense of every other subject. One day I went to him in tears and said I thought my history was better than he gave me credit for. He said he thought my history was very good, but my writing was appalling, and he marked me as an examiner would: ‘You have a problem with your writing, Gill.’ And I thought, actually, no I don’t. You have the problem with my writing. To me it makes perfect sense. And I pretty much decided then and there always to make my dyslexia someone else’s problem. There was, though, the ‘one’ teacher. The one that, if we’re lucky, we all manage to find. He taught English. Peter Scupham. He didn’t teach me how to write, he didn’t do phonics or useful tricks to distinguish endings; he taught me how to read. He didn’t even do that, really. He just showed me how to read. He read all the time – often out loud.

On his cancer:

He was wearing the antiseptic face, the professional-doctor tragedy mask. I’m getting to see this a lot now. It is as much a protection against the infection of catastrophe for them as a respect for its victim. They glaze the bad news with sweet spittle. They’ll say: ‘The test results were not quite what we hoped. It might be trapped wind or it might be the thing that hatched from John Hurt’s stomach. Realistically, we’ll have to assume it’s more alien than fart.’

I like my oncologist. He doesn’t have the morphine face; he looks amused, inquisitive, like a shaved, garrulous otter. All he does is lung cancer. This is his river, tumours his trout. He’s been a consultant for 15 years. Two years in, his father got it and died: ‘The worst thing I’ve ever had to go through. I do know what this is like – so how much do you want to know?’ ‘Everything, and the truth.’

More X-rays and blood tests and the surgeon returns with the complete granite face and says: ‘Well, it could be a burst ulcer, but of course it isn’t. The tumour in your pancreas has increased in size very fast. It’s as big as a fist.’ And he shows me a fist in case I’d misplaced the image.

That evening I’m sitting in bed on the cancer ward trying to get the painkillers stabilised and a young nurse comes in. ‘There you are. I’ve been waiting for you all day. You’re supposed to be with me down in chemotherapy. I saw your name. Why are you up here?’ ‘Well, it turns out the chemo isn’t working.’ Her shoulders sag and her hand goes to her head. ‘Fuck, fuck, that’s dreadful.’ I think she might be crying. I look away, so might I. You don’t get that with private health care.

But always a sense of humour when regarding the world: here he is buying a burqa.

It’s made of nylon, the kind that produces enough static to run a short-wave radio. Don’t you have anything in cotton? ‘Certainly, it’s cheaper. The women prefer nylon.’ Then he gives me one of those quotes that make you think the world has tripled in size and we’re all separated by insurmountable cultural distance. ‘Nylon is the modern fashionable choice.’ The idea that anything about a burqa could be deemed either fashionable or modern proves that we are singing from very different hymn sheets.

Manhattan is now one of the safest places in the West to live. It’s also one of the dullest. More concerned with aspiration and appearances than life, the city that never slept now doesn’t go out much past 9.30 pm as it has to get into the office by 6 am. It runs on the spot to CNN, not dances in the dark to Madonna. It just shows you should be careful what you ask for.

Sir Thomas Beecham’s advice to try anything once except incest and folk dancing has wrapped the morris in a received wisdom of disdain.

Encouraging youngsters to punch each other’s heads, chase balls or run in circles for money is really qualitatively and socially no different from urchins diving for coins.

The entry for cabbage in the Larousse Gastronomique starts with the heavenly sentence: ‘The cabbage seems to have been unknown to the Hebrews. It is not mentioned in the Bible.’ I love that – so French. Just the slightest note of disappointment with God; just the merest raised eyebrow and pursed Gallic lip. You can imagine a French chef in confession: ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned – but I’m not the only one: God left cabbages out of the Bible.’