A A Gill

Thursday

A A Gill

Meaty matters

From our UK edition

I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruffled into white-tipped skirls by the westerly wind and a squall of cloud that’s shrouding Slioch, the Place of the Spears. The Munroes are steeples at the end of the water, a bastion reminder of Scotland’s eternal war between the fastness and the wetness. I’m up here for the stalking. I come every year. I haven’t taken a shot for some time. I love the stalk: stalking is to walking what opera is to whistling. And I also love going out with people who have never done it before, or for whom pulling the trigger is still the pinch-point of life, death and everything.

Saturday

A A Gill

Despite terror and tragedy, the world remains a miraculous place

From our UK edition

I was on Kangaroo Island, in the great Australian Southern Ocean, when I heard about the terrorist attack on Paris. It was Paul, an abalone diver, who passed on the brief story of atrocity as we bobbed in his chaotic old rubber boat beside black swans, piebald cormorants and piping oystercatchers in the silver morning chill. He was putting on his wetsuit and checking his air line, strapping on his weights before slipping over the side to collect urchins and purple-shelled king scallops. ‘It’s terrible, just terrible,’ he said, in a tone that implied I must be used to this sort of thing. ‘It’s why we live out here. Nothing happens. It’s quiet and safe.

Thursday

A A Gill

Australian Notebook

From our UK edition

 Margaret River, Western Australia I’m here for a food festival, and to help along my autobiography. The Blonde had cashed in turn-left, en-suite tickets, and said we were going to take the twins. I pulled faces and sucked my teeth, and whined that it was an awful long way, and it would mostly be work. But as usual, she was quite right. Travelling with the kids has made everything brilliant, intensely observed fun. But I have spent a lot of time standing under eucalyptus trees in the dusk, being lectured about marsupials by men in shorts. The marsupials are interesting, though oddly unempathetic or winning, and they remind me of someone or something else. A decidedly irascible collective of single-minded obsessives, with issues and dietary requirements.

Saturday

A A Gill

Food and Drink

From our UK edition

Spectator Scoff - Spring 2011 View online version  |  View print version9th April 2011 It’s been a long cold winter, but here we are at last in the blossom-laden, golden days of spring. There’s plenty of seasonal produce for food and wine lovers to enjoy within our pages, much to excite and inspire, and maybe even one or two things to annoy — if you run a supermarket. Spectator Scoff - Summer 2011 View online version  |  View print version2nd July 2011 Maybe it's the rising heat, but this season's edition of Spectator Scoff has a rather more prickly, edgy feel to it - some beefy controversies to fire up your mental barbecues.

Saturday

A A Gill

Candid camera

From our UK edition

A.A. Gill talks to his friend Terry O’Neill, whose iconic photographs captured an entirely new kind of celebrity I remember the first time Terry O’Neill took my photograph: he wore blue; I wore grey and the Great War helmet of the third regiment of Pomeranian Grenadiers. We were at the Imperial War Museum, and the nice curator gave me the tin hat with reverence. ‘They’re surprisingly hard to get hold of in good condition, considering how many were made,’ he said. This one had been lifted from a corpse in Arras. And I can pass on to Spectator readers — because I know how much you love this sort of thing — that the second world war version is slightly smaller than the first, to save steel. I donned the coal scuttle and a Teutonic demeanour.