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Friday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

The Groucho Club died years ago

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

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Bring back suet!

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

Guy Kennaway

The day my mother asked me to kill her

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,

Wednesday

Nigel Jones

The unforgivable bias of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall

Anyone watching The Mirror and the Light – the BBC adaptation of the final part of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy – can admire the performances of Damian Lewis as Henry VIII, and Mark Rylance as Mantel’s hero Thomas Cromwell. But no one should confuse them with real history. The late Dame Hilary was a classic case of an artist letting her personal background and education slant her presentation of the historical record. Mantel had an awfully strict Roman Catholic upbringing and allowed her suffering at the hands of school nuns to dictate the way she saw the English 16th-century Reformation. She came to believe that ‘no respectable person’ could

Mary Dejevsky

Have you been mis-sold a car loan? Probably not

You would be hard put to find a doughtier defender of British consumerdom than me. I don’t flinch from returning things that don’t work or don’t fit. I have successfully challenged supermarket bills as well as a fine for driving down a poorly signposted low traffic neighbourhood. So I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to consumer rights. Even for me, though, there comes a point where the buyer has to bear some responsibility. And that point is reached with the cash cow of the hour – historical car loans. As of a court judgment last month, the position is this: if you bought a car from a dealer with

Rhys Laverty

RIP to my old band T-shirts

‘This is beginning to fall apart – I think it’s just age.’ Words spoken on the evening of my 32nd birthday. Thankfully, my wife wasn’t referring to my body or our marriage. Almost as tragic though, it was another band T-shirt, the fourth in as many weeks to finally give up the ghost. Big things, like turning 30 or becoming a dad, don’t really rattle me This is no small thing for me. From about 2007 onwards, I had a reliable default outfit: band T-shirt, black skinny jeans, black Converse All-Stars (high-top). Unlike many of my peers, I escaped the early years of marriage without a wardrobe purge by my

Tuesday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Get police out of the playground

It’s not just that the lunatics – sorry, ‘neuro-diverse’ – have taken over the asylum. They’ve taken over the asylum and started walking on their hands, and they’re determined to make us do the same or feel ashamed for staying the right way up. That is what I thought, anyway, when I read that children as young as nine are being cautioned by the police for calling each other names in the playground. Half a century later, at 65, I have extremely high self-esteem The correct way to counter name-calling is either to hurl them back or ignore them. As a teenager, I was occasionally called a ‘witch’ by schoolmates