The Swill
The Swill is a journalist, of a sort, best known for stuffing his face on an expense account and writing about it. In a long and unvaried career he has managed to offend the Welsh - "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls", the English - "a lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd", the Manx - "hopeless, inbred mouth-breathers known as Bennies" and Clare Balding - "a dyke on a bike". Our hero has been married twice (once to a Tory MP), shot a baboon whom he wasn't married to and is an alcoholic. Worryingly, he has also sired four children and, like Hitler, is a failed artist. Restaurant reviews don't interest me; restaurant reviewers still less, and in the normal way of things the Swill's vapid meanderings would have passed me by, but when a man who makes a small fortune from modest talent has the cheek to call expats in the Gulf " parasites a...