Mark Steyn writes:
As I said, all that’s from just one A A Gill column, written at a far higher level than a dying industry demands, at least to judge from The New York Times or The Washington Post. It was published just two years ago, when he confidently expected to live to see another four World Cups, as he put it. Thus he neglected to note that another sign of the accumulating years is that more and more of your contemporaries, whether former pop stars or mighty captains of industry, migrate from “Today’s Birthdays” to the obituary column. And so a few weeks ago he mentioned to his readers in the course of a restaurant review that he had “an embarrassment of cancer, the full English” – for non-Britons, that’s an allusion to the huge and indigestible “full English breakfast” (which, credit where it’s due, is a vegan snack next to the full Irish).
So he coined a phrase even for his death sentence, and one that’s almost too perfect for a gourmand and restaurant critic. And its rueful if faintly parodic stiff-upper-lipped stoicism would have earned the gruff approval of all those long-gone Englishmen of the Fifties opening up pub doors and asking if the major had been in. Rest in peace.
