Julie Burchill

I was a teenage shoplifter. I had a good run at it, from 12 to 14, and found it as addictive as any drug: the anticipation, the antsiness, the sharp stab of joy on completion. But all it took was getting caught, spending an hour in a police cell before being grimly collected and yelled at by my dad, to make sure I never went looking for a five-finger discount again. Shoplifting used to be something which, with the help of stern parents and the police, people grew out of. No longer. Now we are in a world of, as the Gail’s Bakery boss Luke Johnson has put it, ‘widespread, really widespread aggression, abuse and shoplifting’. Asda chairman Stuart Rose says that shoplifting has effectively been decriminalised due to lack of police action.

I hoped that we would soon see the back of Jamie Oliver, once a ubiquitous presence on television, as his youthful Golden Labrador-ish appeal waned and his mouth increasingly looked like something you’d find on the end of a fishing rod. But regrettably, like many of the cor blimey pretend meritocrats of his era – from David Beckham to Jonathan Ross – he has proved as determined to hold on to his place on the dung heap of fortune as any old landed toff. It seems the ceaselessly acquisitive Oliver clan want some more of whatever pie is being divided. Is the world ready for Buddy, his 12-year-old son, who has just been awarded his own BBC cooking show?

When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we must have looked more like The Flintstones. We were particularly fond of Duran Duran videos – and of a philosophical debate which was first aired in 1986 on the then-sophisticated Channel 4, now most famous for showcasing a transvestite playing the piano with their penis. The debate was part of the Modernity And Its Discontents series, this particular episode being called ‘The Tough And The Tender’ in which Michael Ignatieff interviewed the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor.

I felt a flash of affection reading that Boris Johnson’s plan to build an outdoor swimming pool at his second home in Oxfordshire may be stalled by the presence of great crested newts. What a very Bojo situation; seeing the big picture, seeking fun, determined to do things large – but hampered all the way. Carrie will probably have told him that it will be lovely for their three kiddies and that they’ll save a fortune on days out in the school holidays. But, trust me, as someone who was owned by a swimming pool for the best part of a decade, this may well be one folly too far, even for Boris.

It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity. OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it wasn’t anywhere near as dragged out as the Sinéad O’Connor cover. So when I heard that the singer had died at the age of 56, my first thought was, selfishly ‘Oh no – they’ll be playing That Song all day!

Jane Birkin, who died this week at the age of 76, appeared to be a delightful woman – attractive, adventurous and stoic. Nevertheless, I had to look twice at the Daily Mail headline on Monday which screeched 'Jane Birkin, a true style icon who put today's trashy celebs to shame'. Are they talking about the same Jane Birkin, I wonder? The one whose first film role, when still a teenager, was as a naked, nameless model ‘romping’ in a threesome with David Hemmings and Gillian Hills? I mean, talk about nice work if you can get it – but pretty ‘trashy’ if you want to fling around words like that about actual human beings, which I generally don’t.

In an interesting piece for Air Mail, Linda Wells writes of ‘The secret lives of tanorexics’, asking: ‘What drives these bronze obsessives – and why won’t they ever learn?’ She questions her sun-baked friends about why they are so intent on doing a thing which they are warned will ruin their complexions and make it more likely that they get cancer – and doesn’t get a satisfactory answer from any of them. Reading it, I realised that I too am a tanorexic. It kind of creeps up on you over the years, like any other bad habit: one minute you’re having a harmless half-hour in a sun-trap pub garden in Hove and the next your hair’s falling out in Crete, as happened to me when I failed to wear a sun hat in July some years back.

On my 20th birthday, I locked myself in the bathroom of my bungalow in­­ Billericay and cried. Having achieved my dream – becoming a published writer – at the tender age of 17, I thought it was all downhill from there. Yes, some of this had to do with marrying the first man I had sex with; the idea that I was only ever meant to do the deed with him alone appalled me beyond words. But there was also a general feeling that my value was in some way intrinsically bound up with my extreme youth. Fast-forward to the day I turned 60, when I woke up in an Art Deco flat with the sea at the bottom of the street, married to a man (third time lucky) who could still make me laugh after a quarter of a century.