A A Gill

I never want to write like THIS or THIS.

I love A A Gill. Or, should I say, I like A A Gill - an English restaurant critic whose prose wins over the weak hearted in droves.

In the UK, the laws of defamation are different, so restaurant critics have more latitude to criticise a restaurant. Gill takes advantage of this by always doing, "the fish tasted like HORSE SHIT that a horse had re-eaten and SHAT OUT AGAIN. Then eaten AGAIN then shat out AGAIN!!!!" thing.

It's lazy. And it's arrogant.

I never want to write like that, and sometimes I worry that I do. I think it's an easy trap to fall into for writers who are confident with their style: the trap of overconfidence. Often, one has to consider what barriers one has erected to protect oneself from it. I wonder if I've done enough.

Paragraphs like this are not OK, not matter how inflated the ego or experienced the journalist. I do not support this (especially considering it's in a restaurant review):

"Stephen Fry is nice. He is a lexicon of nice. A trifle of nice. A temple of nice. A multistorey car park of four-door nice, with sunroofs. Fry has taken a vow of niceness never to be anything but nice to anyone or anything. He once said that being a critic was the most awful thing, because you could make people cry. He said he would never criticise and swore to be nice, a particularly denying ordinance for a comedian: so much humour is cruelty. I suspect that for Fry, it is also self-preservation. Every small act of niceness is a deposit in the good-karma bank. As you reap, so shall you sow. If you are prone to internal sadness and gloom and brown studies, and stare over precipices, then the kindness of strangers is an important consideration. "