Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
It’s generally my morning habit to leap out of bed at 5am singing the Queen song ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, but on those rare mornings when I sleep in, nothing can be guaranteed to finally get me moving at 5.43am as surely as Radio 4’s Prayer For The Day. One of two things will happen;
As someone who was fond of Derek Draper (a feeling that probably wasn’t mutual, as I nicked his bird) it was strange to see photographs of his funeral. It seemed like a state occasion for some legendary leader who had died in battle defending his country, rather than for the husband of a likeable TV
Though I believe that people who use the phrase ‘retail therapy’ should probably have their voting rights removed, I do like shops – the lights and the people and the chatter. My mum was a shopgirl for much of her life and the only other job I’ve had apart from being a writer was as a teenage
When I was a child, learning about the Holocaust, I used to believe that what happened to the Jews in Germany could never happen here. My reasons for this were vague and cultural; Dad’s Army, comic operetta contrasted with Wagner, the sheer silliness of Hitler’s strutting. No country with a sense of humour could ever surely
Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in
Might the King’s cancer diagnosis lead the Royals to put aside the squabbles that have torn the family apart and come together, having seen the bigger picture of life and death? It is quite touching that the prodigal son, Prince Harry, rocked up, however briefly, in London to visit his dad, though it’s hoped he’s
Whenever international affairs are proving particularly ‘interesting’ there’s always some clown who pipes up with ‘Oh, if only women ruled the world – it would be so peaceful!’ But females can be every bit as keen on a ding-dong or a dust-up as men; in fact, I’d say that women who try to push the
Was I the only person who felt a flash of disappointment when a source said of the imminent Girls Aloud re-union that ‘No one wants it to be a catfight’? Obvs I don’t just want a catfight – they’re the best girl group ever, so they are artists and women of substance. But just a
Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘I like to express myself through what I wear’ I know we’re dealing
I surely wasn’t the only citizen of Brighton and Hove who breathed a sigh of relief when the Green council was turfed out by Labour last May after years of misrule. To be fair, it had been a bit of a semi-farcical pass-the-parcel situation for quite some time. Labour caved to the Greens in the
We’re all wise to those phoney rotters who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ – the excellent phrase coined by the social commentator Rob Henderson in 2019 to describe ‘the modern trend among affluent Americans to use their beliefs as a way to display their social status… a belief held or espoused in order to signal that a
Due to my rather efficacious dabbling in semaglutides last summer, I’m currently on the mailing list of several online pharmacies, and the other day I received an email making me aware of the existence of ‘fit notes’ – ‘formerly known as sick notes’ – following ‘an appropriate online consultation with one of our GPs’. The consultation
Growing up in 1970s working-class Bristol (before it went all poke: posh and woke) life was so tribal that you could get beaten up at school as a general election approached if it somehow emerged that your parents wouldn’t be voting Labour. (Our local MP for Bristol South-East was the dashing young Tony Benn, so
Does anybody actually watch televised Hollywood award shows anymore unless, like me, they’re being paid to? Until ‘The Incident’ at the 2022 Oscars between Will Smith and Chris Rock, the answer was clear; between 2014 and 2020, even the Academy Awards lost almost half their audience, which fell to 23 million. But in 2023, figures
For inadequate men scared by self-willed women, by the start of the 21st century, things were getting dangerously out of hand. The old right-wing ‘Kinder, Küche, Kirche’ method of corralling and controlling us had been woefully discredited with the second world war. (Like the old brand of anti-Semitism, coincidentally, which was also looking for a new angle – and found it in the fresh’n’funky Islamist kind.) A ‘caring’ and ‘progressive’ way to
I’ve always admired Israeli women. Though I didn’t see any in the flesh before my first trip to the Promised Land 20 years ago, at Sunday School I far preferred the complex women of the Old Testament – Deborah the judge, Yael the assassin, Ruth the first philo-Semite – to the repenting hookers and grieving
I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15. Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody
It can’t be any fun to have lung cancer as Dame Esther Rantzen does; I watched my father die from mesothelioma over the best part of a decade, and in the last couple of years this once tall, handsome, athletic man was more or less a tumour on legs. But I recall the zest with
Shane MacGowan’s death and his star-studded funeral captured the headlines this week. But the fawning and fanfare felt oddly dissonant to me: was I the only person in the media who never cared for him? I’m used to not holding the same opinions as most people in my profession; this is quite understandable, as only
Christmas means different things to different people; for Mary Sue, it will be yet another excuse to queen it over her friends. Her Christmas pudding will have been made from scratch, her carefully curated tree decorations will tell myriad stories of a perfect home life, her tasteful National Trust Christmas cards will have been sent
