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On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members’ club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or

Stir-up Sunday may be behind us, but it’s not too late to make your Christmas pudding – and do you know what that means? Yep, sourcing decent beef suet. Suet is the king of fats. It adds to the pudding’s keeping quality, texture and flavour. My recipe calls for half a pound of suet (see below for the recipe in full – it was my great-aunt’s) but the good stuff is hard to find. You can get pellets of suet in a packet from supermarkets, but the real thing, grated into light flakes, is another story: much nicer and lighter. Some inferior recipes suggest butter instead, but good as butter

With today’s vote on the assisted dying bill, I am reminded of my mother. Susie was 89, in failing health but of sound mind, when she took me aside at her house in the south of France to tell me she wanted me to kill her. She had no intention, she said, of enduring the humiliation of a decaying memory and a crumbling body, and was determined to avoid the old people’s home, the geriatric ward and the hospice. Some days my mum really wanted to kill herself, and some days she really did not ‘You have to know,’ she said to me, ‘not only when to leave a job,