Diary

A.A.Gill

23 April 2011

A.A. Gill opens his Diary

I was wondering in a middle-class, Spectator-ish sort of way, what would be the most embarrassing thing that could happen to you in public? Having your phone go off in the middle of The Marriage of Figaro at Covent Garden? No, my neighbour in the dress circle whispered, having your mobile play the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in the middle of Figaro at Covent Garden. Ten years ago, I sat through a play called Shopping and Fucking that was radical and artistically obscene. There was a scene where a distressed man drops his trousers, bends over and asks someone to sodomise him because it reminds him of his father. At this point an American rose from the stalls and shouted that this was irredeemable filth and he wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. The expression on the faces of the Guardian-reading audience was fantastic. Oh the horror, the terrible, terrible sacrilege. They looked like a Bateman cartoon: the man who spoke up at the Royal Court.

We were in Copenhagen last week with a couple of Icelandic friends who were keen to discover the result of their referendum. They had both voted against paying off the bankers’ losses. ‘The financial collapse is not the best thing that’s ever happened to Iceland,’ said Egert. ‘But it is better than the paper boom. The money was divisive and made us miserable and avaricious. It was very un-Icelandic. Now things are hard again, which is how they should be in Iceland. We have our community back. People are much closer. We started knitting and singing. We in Iceland knit beautifully and sing beautifully.’

I’m promoting a book at the moment. The interviewers always fling quotes at me. They are invariably clichéd and crass and I never remember having written them. But Ben Schott of the magisterial Miscellany asked if he could quote something I’d written, which I also had no memory of, but I did think is actually quite clever: ‘I’ve often thought that Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You’re born Italian: they’re relentlessly infantile and mother-obsessed. In childhood you’re English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey and only happy kicking balls, pulling the legs off things, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. During middle age, we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous and pedantic. And finally we regress into being Belgian, with no idea who we are at all.’