Diary

A.A.Gill

23 April 2011

A.A. Gill opens his Diary

Two men on a first date get chucked out of the John Snow pub in Soho for kissing. There’s a whole lot of issues here, not least the recurring heterosexual jealousy of gays who manage to get a proper snog on a first date. And then, how can anyone have a pub in Soho and be surprised by men kissing? And how can anyone be a landlord anywhere and be shocked by anything that happens in a pub? Customers regularly wet themselves, vomit down each other’s necks, have hysterical crying jags, queue up to inseminate each other in fetid toilets and read the Daily Express. The faux prudery and front-parlour morality of your average England landlord is something I’d forgotten about, and not having to listen to it is one of the bonuses of not having picked up a drink for 25 years. But I do think that one of the pleasures of going to European cities is seeing people kiss in public. Not for any prurient reason, but just the vitality, the excitement and the joy of it. The person who occasionally kisses me with intent takes a sterner line. She insists public kissing should be restricted to stations and airports, and only then when one of you has a ticket. And to very attractive people — apparently the cut-off age is 25. The John Snow pub is named not (as you’d imagine in Soho) after Channel 4’s newsreader, but after the father of epidemiology, who proved that cholera was spread by germs and not miasma. The source of the epidemic was the water pump in Broadwick Street.

Went to the first night of Betty Blue Eyes. In front was David Hasselhoff with a very pretty and willingly accoutred blonde girl who I wasn’t about to mistake for his daughter. The papers next day said she was Welsh and that he couldn’t understand a word she said. Result. They started pecking at each other like bored bantams as the overture struck up and by the end of the first number she was sucking his face, as if the tan was salted caramel, which it might well have been. It was a memorable night: the Hoff and, on stage, the mechanical pig with the voice of Kylie Minogue. I wonder how they sold that to her. ‘We’ve got this pig, we thought of you.’

1 | 2 Next page