Gill Sans

It used to be ERIC Gill that outraged people, what with his wacky lifestyle involving incest, bestiality and stone-carving, but it seems that A. A. Gill, with his pathetic "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die" sub-Hemingway piece about shooting a baboon just for a laugh, is intent on carrying on the tradition. Well, watch out A. A., one day, thanks to the magic of search and replace, you might find yourself sitting on a cloud, twanging a harp, and reading this:-

So I’m in Hampstead, in a hat, with dark intentions and a truck full of guns and other blokes in hats. Josh the Baboon said: “Why don’t we shoot A. A. Gill?” All nonchalant, looking out of the window at the amazing Tanzanian acacia scrub that drifts into the Serengeti plain. What about A. A. Gill?

And here’s the thing. If you tool around the beautiful and unruly bits of Africa long enough in the company of gangs of Baboons in purposeful hats, sooner or later you’re going to do A. A.Gill. You think you’re not, you think you’re the exception, you’re going to just say no, but pretty soon it’s the monkey on your back. I should have worn my Stella McCartney hat.

So, I said, why not? Just a little one. I can handle it; I’ll be a recreational primate killer. Now, despite all indications to the contrary, A. A. Gill isn’t stupid. Well, no stupider than Piers Morgan. They know that Baboons in hats, hanging around in trucks with guns, are up to no good. They see you, they sod off, going back to their Hampstead homes where they enjoy riding their mums like little jockeys. And then they stand around in bars and bark like alsatians and jump up and down, mooning with their big meaty arses, like a lot of Millwall supporters down West Ham. Ha!

But neither A. A. Gill nor Piers Morgan are smart enough to have invented telescopic sights. So there was this little weedy bloke leaning against a menu, picking his fingernails, a nerdy geezer sitting in the restaurant with his tuxedo off. I took him just below the armpit. He slumped and slid sideways. I’m told they can be tricky to shoot: they run into the kitchens, hang on for grim life. They die hard, restaurant critics. But not this one. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. We paced the ground. The air was filled with a furious keening of his fellow diners. Two hundred and fifty yards. Not a bad shot. I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this.

There is no mitigation. A. A. Gill isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. They might, at some unspecified theoretical future date, eat birds’ eggs, young impalas and dik-diks — they are opportunist omnivores, but that very much depends on “Today’s Special”. You wouldn’t trust A. A. Gill to baby-sit. But then everything has to eat. I noticed that, when he was alive, I thought about A. A. Gill as a thing. Now he’s dead, I’m posthumously anthropomorphising him, and that was one of the reasons I killed him. It was strangely satisfying.