The indiscreet charm of Julie Burchill

One of the downsides of getting older is witnessing your friends and acquaintances being honoured in various ways. I don’t just mean knighthoods and peerages, I also mind the little things — an entry in Who’s Who, for instance, or an honorary degree from a red-brick university. It’s reached such a point that I daresay I’ll feel a pang of envy when I see their obituaries in the Times. ‘That should be me taking up all those column inches, not them,’ I’ll think, before realising what I’m wishing for.

So you can imagine how I felt when I heard that Julie Burchill was going to be on Desert Island Discs. Burchill! I’ve known her, on and off, since I was 19, when she moved in with Cosmo Landesman, my next-door neighbour. We became best friends and remained close until 1995 when we fell out over the Modern Review, a magazine we’d started together. There then followed a colossal bunfight and we didn’t speak for ten years. But we’ve since patched things up and occasionally exchange friendly emails.

I tuned in, of course — mainly to hear what she had to say about me. Not a mention, if you can believe it. Then again, Landesman didn’t get a name check either and she was married to him for ten years. But she talked a lot about her present husband. Half the show seemed to be about him. The other half was about her lifelong love affair with Judaism. She said the most fun she’s had in the past three years — when she hasn’t been with her husband — has been in Hebrew class.

But it was impossible to stay cross for long. Like her, I’m an ardent -philo-Semite so I thoroughly approved of her choice of records: Exodus by Andy Williams, Hebrewman by Ehud Banai, the Israeli National Anthem, etc.