Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
On hearing that a ‘transgendered flag of remembrance’ was being flown by a government department for the first time (the Department of Education, on November 20th, the Transgender Day Of Remembrance) I was reminded of that old line about prison food – ‘It’s rubbish, and there’s not enough of it!’ It seems the height of
I learned from this little lot that if one has read The Diary of a Nobody, then one can derive pleasure from even the most pedestrian life story, as there’s always an unintentional chuckle to be had. The former racing driver Nigel Mansell’s Staying on Track (Simon & Schuster, £20) delighted me with its Pooterish
Growing up in the West Country in the 1960s and 1970s, summer left me cold. There was only one place where I could bear to be when the sun shone — the lido at Weston-super-Mare, the nearest coastal town to my Bristol home. Unlike most of the banal backdrops to my childhood, it seemed a
Body dysmorphia, the unfortunate medical condition whereby a perfectly pleasant/slender person believes themselves to be ugly/fat, is a strange and sad thing. I’d always presumed it to be (like anorexia and bulimia) a primarily female problem, so much more importance being placed on the appearance of women than men. Respectable medical surveys indicate otherwise. Nevertheless,
Novels set in the music business (from blockbuster to coming-of-age) are few and far between — far less than in the film industry, say. Is this because writers are scared of looking square, Daddy-O, being as a breed not the most ‘street’ of types, whereas pop stars have traditionally been quite rough, ready and proletarian?
Just so you don’t get it confused with the City That Never Sleeps, Tel Aviv — my favovurite place on earth — now markets itself as the Non-Stop City and, indeed, it never lets up for a moment. We like to refer to the Blitz Spirit; Israel has it. Any of the lovely youngsters playing
Gore Vidal once famously said that ‘Television is for appearing on, not watching.’ I feel the opposite. I’ve just turned down a financial offer from Celebrity Big Brother for this summer’s series so big it made my eyes water — and I’m not easily impressed, size-wise. Verbal people just don’t do well in such a
Unusually, I didn’t leave the British Isles until I was 35, when I went to the Maldives for a fortnight. (You bet it was a culture shock, considering that the most exotic place I’d been until then was the Bognor Regis branch of Butlins.) But I’ve globetrotted like a footloose fiend since then, and on
Work is a funny old thing — a four-letter word to some, the meaning of life to others. There have been occasions during the past three years, since I was given the heave-ho from my last regular newspaper column, when I’ve felt that I didn’t exist any more, despite having a happy marriage and more
In the 1970s, there was a big difference between bullies and cry-babies. Your mum would have preferred you to hang around with the latter, but sometimes the former had a twisted charisma so strong that you found yourself joining in the taunts of ‘Onion Head! ’ at some poor unfortunate creature sporting a cranium of
[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/theriseofleft-wingpopulism/media.mp3″ title=”Julie Burchill and Katie Hopkins discuss whether you can be fat and happy” startat=924] Listen [/audioplayer]I’m a very off-message type of fat broad; one who gladly admits she reached the size she is now solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure, and who rather despises people (except those with proven medical
When I told my friends that I was planning to attend a silent retreat, they all laughed. It’s true that I am something of a convivialist; my idea of heaven is a big table in a warm restaurant, the table shimmering with the laughter of friends and the glugging of wine, and me picking up
Looking at the brightly coloured front cover of this book, I felt cheerful; turning it over and seeing the word ‘gender’, my heart sank. When I was a kiddy in the early 1970s, the word (especially when combined with ‘bending’) seemed full of fun and flighty possibilities — David Bowie in a dress, Marc Bolan
I’ve never lived with a man I didn’t marry: Tweedledee, 1979–1984, and Tweedledum, 1984–1995. (The names have been changed to irritate the pair of them.) So when I left my second union and moved to Brighton to chase the man who is now my third (and hopefully final) husband, I was keen to establish and
As a provincial teenage virgin with ideas so far above my station that they gave me vertigo, I frequently reflected bitterly that whoever coined the phrase ‘Schooldays are the best days of your life’ must have come to that conclusion after being involved in a serious car-crash the evening following their last day at school,
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Mark Steyn is sort of a hairy, successful version of me— a civilised, larky type of chap who was just tootling along minding his own biz and scribbling about his favourite show-tunes when — crash, bang, wallop! — he found himself on the frontline of commentating
It’s always interesting when people succeed in two different arenas — like Mike Nesmith’s mum, who gave the world both a Monkee and Tippex, or Hedy Lamarr, the beautiful film star who also helped develop wireless communication, or Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger who also invented the artificial heart. (If only he’d played the
Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview
I couldn’t work out whether Caitlin Moran’s How to Build a Girl (Ebury, £14.99) was aimed at mature adolescents or immature adults, but I loved it anyway — even before I came across the very pleasing mention of myself in Chapter 20, and the even better one in Chapter 24. Tamar Cohen’s The Broken (Doubleday, £6.99) was that miracle
A spoof in the Israeli Daily recently had Eminem planning to convert to Judaism and move to Tel Aviv. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing that any time soon – he’s not really waiting for the Messiah, he’s just a very naughty boy. Still, stranger things have happened. I was very amused by the
