If you are wondering why there was an eerie silence yesterday it was because Cinderella did go to the ball, or at least to a very wonderful dinner at the extraordinary Strawberry Hill House and it took me most of Saturday to fight free of my whale bone and hair pins. And get the tiara back to the bank. It is quite hard work being grand,
We are hearing today of the death of the writer AA Gill, only three weeks after he announced in his restaurant review column that he was unwell, and not in the Geoffrey Barnard way, but with what he described as ‘the full English’ of cancer. Sadly he was, as my Mother was wont to say of anyone unde ninety, ‘No age’.
One of the few things I remain passionate about is the English language which was AA Gills medium, his art form, although with a deep irony he was dyslexic and had to dictate his copy, almost certainly the last journalist afforded that luxury. I also thank my lucky stars, not having a God to turn to, that I have it as my first language. I can’t remember exactly how many words it has – 60,000? you can Google it – but it’s way more than any other language, possibly of all the other languages put together. Imagine being a foreigner(A shudder ripples round the room) and having to learn it.
And it also makes learning a lot of other languages much easier because we’ve probably already requisitioned about half of their meagre quantity of words. A useful book called ‘Plain Tales of the Raj’ has a list of all the Indian words that we now assume were always our own – like bungalow and khaki. There are even five Inuit (Eskimo, in old money) words in regular use in this country – where did you think anorak and kayak came from? – and that could well be about a third of their total. What else did they need on a regular basis? Snow, ice, polar bear, run.
I don’t imagine that young folk have the remotest idea of who Enoch Powell was, and older readers won’t have much good to say about him, his politics being deeply unfashionable at the time, but having actually met him let me tell you that among his better qualities were his personal shyness, his integrity, his poetry – bet you didn’t know about that! – and his mastery of he English language. He was to oratory what AA Gill was to the written word; a masterclass in how to do it. It’s a shame that he will only be remembered for one ill advised speech. Those over 21 will also have heard of Bob Dylan, another wordsmith very properly recognised by the Nobel committee. Language does matter.
As I said before about Derek Jarman, AA Gill and I differ in that he was male, talented and now dead. Let’s just hope our wonderful language still has a long life in front of it.

AA Kingston (No relation)