Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a much-beloved member of the royal family who died ten years ago today — Princess Diana, perhaps, whose posthumous 60th birthday we recently celebrated. (This one also has her very own statue, a bronze one in her stomping ground of Camden Town.) This Jewish princess had
Have you heard about ‘Woke Coke’ – ‘Wokaine’, if you will? Apparently drug dealers are now targeting the WaWs (Woke And Wealthy) with gear at £200 a gram (when I quit six years ago, £70 was the going price) and a promise that your particular little bindel of joy is ‘environmentally friendly’ and ‘ethically sourced’ from
One of the many reasons I hate wokers is because they indulge so shamelessly in what Bebel coined ‘the socialism of fools’ – anti-Semitism – under the convenient cover of sticking up for the Palestinians. Pretty much all socialism is for fools these days and as we see the Tories ditch misogyny, racism and austerity
Watching the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh at the weekend — that Land Rover, that lack of eulogy — I felt an alien emotion steal over me. Shortly after the last blast of the bagpipes faded away, I realised what it was: I’d like to be like that. Amusingly, the only person this working-class
What an awful title. Something we hacks are forever saying (along with ‘Make mine a double’ and ‘Is it still plagiarism if I change the names and set it in Singapore rather than Sheffield?’) is: ‘WE DON’T WRITE THE HEADLINES.’ How much worse, then, when it’s a book, and such an excellent one to boot:
Seeing my hometown, Bristol, in flames this week following the violent ‘Kill the Bill’ riots, it was unrecognisable as the safe south-west city which I had dreamed of leaving since the age of 12 (when I started sleeping beneath a poster of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map). I finally escaped to the capital in
It’s Mother’s Day and, once again, I muse on how little some friends really know one. I never expect anything in a friendship that I can’t return – hence I do not look for loyalty or kindness – but the only area in which I am ceaselessly short-changed is in the business of being seen
As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine,
As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on
January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start
Priti Patel, Ms Priti Patel, Burnished by sunshine of far Israel, How we all cheered when on Marr you did smirk, And as he got rattled, we yelled ‘O, good work!’ – Love-thirty, love-forty, oh weakness of joy, With the speed of a swallow you mangled the goy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you played Marr,
Saying you don’t like Bananarama is like saying you don’t like summer or Marilyn Monroe — a sure sign of a misanthropist who thinks that being a wet blanket makes them interesting. OK, they never had a blazing talent — their three small, sweet pipings barely adding up to one decent voice — but they
‘Wild’ used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag. Everyone seems to want to get in
I have many fine qualities – but being a good judge of character is not one of them. Put me in a room with six saints and a psychopath and we all know who I’m going to be swearing blood-brotherhood with by the end of the evening. Interestingly, this hasn’t left me feeling like a
I don’t care for Elton John. A cross between Violet Elizabeth Bott and Princess Margaret, his temper tantrums are legendary, whether asking fans on to the stage to dance and then screaming at them not to get so close, or demanding that an employee do something about the blustery weather keeping him awake. They say
I am that rare thing, a vice-signaller; a breed defined by the fact that unlike our virtue-signalling opposites, we delight in presenting ourselves as somewhat worse than we are. Reasons vary; sometimes we were Bad People in the past and changed but (like teenage wallflowers who grew into table-dancing divas and still describe themselves as
My admiration for Deborah Harry goes back a long way and — fittingly for a woman who even as a septuagenarian has an air of juvenile delinquency about her — got me into trouble as a teenage writer on the music press. Sent to review the hot new American group Talking Heads, who were in
There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life
There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life
On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a fortune from persuading a generation of women that brunch with a bunch of broads was something to aspire to. The second scrapped his way through Spain, eventually establishing an independent principality. But the thing film
