Adrian Chiles Does Not Miss

Link: Adrian Chiles Does Not Miss by Niall Anderson. Published Tue 26 Oct 2021.

This needed verbalising. Adrian doesn’t know what he’s talking about and is open about this.

Adrian Chiles, who has been a columnist at The Guardian since 2019, will never run out of things to say, for the simple reason that he has never had anything to say. Similarly, his writing will never fall from a transformative peak, because peaks are not his style. In fact, none of the things we associate with newspaper columnists are his style. He’s not an analyst. He’s not a diarist. He’s not a polemicist. What he most resembles is a dog who turns up at your ankles hoping you’ll throw that rubber toy again. And you do, though you don’t know why. And the dog comes straight back, though it probably doesn’t know why. And before you know it, you’ve bonded with the dog. You begin to miss the dog when you don’t see it. After a while you start to hold conversations with the dog in your head. The dog is called Adrian and he is A Good Boy.

(This has a rather lovely ending.)