Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Daft celebrity mourners have made 2016 the year of the ‘Tearleader’

Despite my ‘difficult’ reputation, I am a cheery cove in real life, all the more so as I get older. But in true Dorian Grey style, I only stay this way by letting my intolerant side rule the roost on Facebook. Every morning my hot little hands positively itch to unfollow, defriend and block: a day which passes without binning a few dim bulbs is a day wasted.

I’ve had an especially good run of it this year, as two things in particular have acted as cracking prompts for my ‘negging‘ narrative. One has been the showing of bad attitude on the part of many Remain-supporting mates. I don’t expect everyone to be a bold Brexiteer like me, but I do expect people to be good losers. The other is a phenomenon which my husband, with admirable masculine brusqueness, calls ‘tearleading’; that of large groups of people getting together to competitively mourn dead celebrities. So savagely amused was I by the hysteria which swept Facebook this year on the death of Leonard Cohen that I was inspired to finally create my first meme; a laconic-looking Len, above him the words: ‘You OK hun?’ and beneath: ‘Now you’ve got something to cry about’.

Am I cold and heartless? Yes, but it’s more than that. I’ve always known that people I’m fond of will die, and not handily hang about forever in some sort of revenant state in order to spare my tears. Over the past two decades, I’ve dealt with the deaths of the people I loved most – my parents and my son and my in-laws – with a decent deal of stoicism, so it would be seven sorts of weird for me to start tearing my hair and rending my garments in the street over the cessation of strangers, no matter how talented.

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