In my opinion

Not everyone will agree with me but one of the defining characteristics of blogging is how egotistical it is - most blog posts are, after all, about what the writer has seen, done or thinks about the topic they're writing about.  There are very few opportunities in journalism for a writer to insert themselves into a story.

That is unless you happen to be someone like food and travel writer AA Gill, who has made a career from sharing his very strong, very subjective opinions, and was in Sydney last week for the Sydney Writers' Festival.

I wasn't lucky enough to get a ticket to his session with globe-trotting chef/writer Anthony Bourdain  (not for lack of trying; they seemed to sell out in about two minutes), but I was inspired by the brilliant profile by Nick O'Malley in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald to pick up a copy of Gill's 2007 book Table Talk. How could I not after this description:

His writing is precise and poised, profane and savage. It is famously, horribly funny. It is marked by wild, mean metaphor and simile. In an evisceration of the Parisian bistro L'Ami Louis published last month (now the subject of 752,000 web references) he bestowed upon its waiters the "meaty malevolence of gouty buffalo" and described its oversized snails as "dinosaur boogers".

Gill's burlesque prose would collapse under its own weight if it weren't for the carefully crafted frame on which it is built. Phrases and sentences tumble over one another and rhythms erupt before he sinks the slipper. "It's all timing, everything is timing," he says. "Iambic pentameter. We speak in threes."

Gill has pissed a lot of people off with his iambic pentameter. His Wikipedia entry is a list of complainants. There are the Welsh ("loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls"; the English ("lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed''); residents of Norfolk ("the hernia on the end of England''); of the Isle of Man ("[it has] fallen off the back of the history lorry to lie amnesiac in the road to progress"); the Albanians (''short and ferretfaced, with the unisex stumpy, slightly bowed legs of Shetland ponies'').

As I said, brilliant! (And I'm saying that about both Gill and O'Malley's prose.)

I am less than a third of the way through Table Talk and already Gill has eviscerated vegetarians, pandas, dinner parties, Milton Keynes (a British "New Town" which undoubtedly deserves it), holier-than-thou organic restaurants, the ballet Coppelia, politicians and fat picnicers in clip-on bowties.

Given that I don't usually write about books until after I've finished them, why am I writing about this one now? Because it will go some way to explain, if you happen to see me on the bus or train tomorrow, why I'm giggling, sniggering and guffawing helplessly.

And because I can - it's my blog...!