Cocaine, cooking and how my late father A. A. Gill’s memoir saved my life…
I reeled away from this dramatic and pungent book never wanting to eat in a restaurant again, such are Alasdair Gill’s fruity descriptions of chefs scrubbing spillages off the floor, hosing down oily dishes, and everyone stinking of bleach, ‘surrounded by feathers and fag ash’, their fingers ‘slick with fat and sauce’.
A busy kitchen is made to sound like a cross between an unregulated slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum in the days of screams and electric shocks. Chefs all seem damaged people, ‘highly emotional, rageful and toxic’. They are ‘nomadic, semi-feral runts stitched together with nicotine’.
Throughout Knives And Spoons, Gill is anxious to repeat the point, that there’s a lot of anger involved in mixing salad dressing and chopping carrots, ‘like steam whistling out of a boiling pressure pot’.
AA Gill with his children
As he explains, the whole reason they become chefs is because they ‘can’t read, organise or multiply or behave’, often struggling with ADHD, autism or dyslexia. In his teens and 20s, Gill was ‘unmanageable, unhinged, unreliable’ – and proud of it.
He saw himself as ‘wired for discomfort’ and overdosed on anything that might blank out his mood swings. He therefore spent his wages on drugs and cheap gin, 14 per cent corner-shop cider and two-litre bottles of eastern European vodka.
Gill had a huge appetite for crack cocaine, ketamine and fentanyl. Heating up foil on a spoon or rolling what in Withnail And I is called a Camberwell Carrot, ‘I inhaled sharply on the spicy joint,’ he recalls with rapture. ‘That sweet, metallic release. Breathing it out and feeling the blood rush all over my being.’
Gill arrived for his shifts either still high and on the edge of consciousness or looking like death warmed up.
Because ‘restaurants are society’s purgatory’ (eh?) – quick hires, quick pay, quick sackings – all sorts of flotsam prepare our meals, with their ‘beetroot-stained knuckles’, filthy clothes and shoes, battered voices, rotting teeth and gums.
Yet despite the itching, sweating and vomiting, and generalised mayhem, the kitchen environment is a safe place for the likes of Gill. ‘The loud and chaotic kitchen was the calmest place for my rattling mind.’
H e claims he always had an affectless personality, with no drive or passion, ‘no awe for the future’. He routinely quit jobs after a few months, fearing suffocation, stagnation, ‘this endless repetition of existing.’
Gill’s emotional relationships were the same – an unwillingness to show commitment, thinking this meant freedom. In fact, he was killing himself, with the belief weed was ‘vital for a serene, healthy life’. Gill thought the grunge junkie image was sexy: ‘There’s an attraction to the guy with the cheeky grin, smoking hash at the afterparty.’
The reality was that Gill instead became someone left in a sort of ‘vacant lobotomised drift’.
After sessions on opioids and white spirits he experienced blackouts, coming to face down on cold and sticky carpets. ‘Weeks were passing that I couldn’t recall.’
When did it start to go wrong, I wonder? Gill was permitted to give up on education and wander around Asia, where he ‘got arrested for opium possession and spent some nights in a Laos prison cell’.
Alasdair Gill at work in a kitchen
He had a talent for finding his way to bars full of crackheads, sex workers and ‘just plain old mentals’ – places for people with Champagne desires and ‘pale ale budgets’.
Meanwhile, ‘I lived at my mum’s’ – Gill’s mother, and this is signally not mentioned in the text, is Amber Rudd, a once-upon-a- time Home Secretary in the Conservative administration.
He is hardly the victim of poverty and underprivilege. Gill has been pampered and indulged, with access to villas in the South of France, a place ‘where I would try to flee to throughout large stretches of my teens and 20s’.
Gill’s father was A. A. Gill, a celebrated food and television critic who successfully battled addiction and died in of cancer 2016, aged 62. ‘Dad was the person you wanted centre table at your dinner party.’ Possibly. I couldn’t stand the way he wore sunglasses indoors.
Having divorced Amber, A. A. Gill’s next partner was Nicola Formby, again not specifically named. ‘I represented a fairly polar opposite image to everything she was.’
Gill is sent by the family to Ireland, to go on a cookery course and sort himself out. ‘After a couple of months, I was steady and better than I’d been in years.’
He soon relapsed, struggling to walk as his motor skills were impaired. ‘I didn’t want to be here any more,’ he confesses.
Doctors diagnosed scarring on his bladder and lungs, and heart irregularities, but the headliner was news that ‘cirrhosis had turned my liver into parfait’. He was told if he carried on like this, he wouldn’t make it to Christmas.
Off he goes to rehab in Scotland. At the clinic, Gill encountered characters who’ve injected so much heroin in the groin, their legs have dropped off. Bulimics colour-code what they eat, so they know what they’ve thrown up by shade.
While there, he discovered his father’s journey through alcoholism in his memoir Pour Me; ‘he was gone, but he’d left something behind – a map drawn in his own wreckage, one last bit of guidance. It was proof that survival, somehow, was hereditary too’.
Today, Gill seems miraculously cured. He now works for himself, doing private functions. Making a weekly lunch for stockbrokers pays better than a 70-hour week in a typical restaurant.
He attracts the sort of client who wants to show off with fancy food in the same way they want to show off with their watches, wives, cars, interior decoration.
There are Zoom meetings about allergens and ‘balancing flavours of depth in each bespoke dish’. Zebra tartare and alligator fillets have featured.
Gill writes very well. Brilliantly actually. He is better than his father. The book is interspersed with fancy recipes: rabbit in mustard with snails; octopus tentacles and the like. But Knives And Spoons is less about food than addiction, psychological heebie-jeebies.
Gill has horrifying personal knowledge of what it is like being on a knife’s edge. If you slack off for a second, ‘chaos doesn’t just creep in. It kicks the door down and starts throwing pans’. He commendably flings the pans back. Will he be the next Naked Chef or Hairy Biker, I wonder?