Julie Burchill

Since I’m so old – 64 this summer – Facebook has always been my preferred form of social media. But if I was a softer soul there’s a feature on it that might really tug at my heartstrings: 'See your memories.' Because many of mine – going back more than a decade – are now blank of any actual memory: 'Content not available.' I know what these were: photographs of me with ex-friends (they’d always take the selfies, as I don’t have a camera-phone) who I’ve fallen out with and who have since deleted the photographs. In 90 per cent of cases, I’d say that I was the one who caused the falling-out.  If I’m being honest, I don’t miss any of them.

Danielle Epstein’s story is a sad one; last year she was in the process of buying a house with her boyfriend when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, underwent a serious operation and had to learn to walk again. He wasn’t the only one who walked; Miss Epstein did also, and not just down the road where she could keep an eye on him, but all the way to sunny Thailand. She said in her defence: 'I felt like the most awful person, leaving somebody because they have cancer, but it was damaging my mental health and it wasn't helping him… I couldn't sleep or eat, I was having panic attacks and was on so much medication to sort myself out I just couldn't function.

Though I’m not the most avid fan of her oeuvre, I was cheered recently to see that Ellie Goulding wanted her new album to be less personal: ‘It was such a relief and really refreshing to not be sitting in the studio going through all the things that happened to me and affected me… it’s the least personal album, but I think it’s the best album because I got to just explore other things about myself. I just really, really enjoy writing; really enjoy being a singer.’ What a refreshing take on the creative process, which in modern times can often seem like a cross between a bulletin from the therapist’s couch and a ceaselessly-picked sore. Millennials can’t seem to get enough of spilling the tea, and that goes especially for their most successful singers.

The alchemy wrought by a young man’s ability to gyrate and croon at the same time is notorious, turning shy mama’s boys from Presley to Rotten into love/hate machines. Something magical happens when someone – however unsightly – sings a song well, allowing him access to a quantity and quality of women undreamt of when he was just walking and talking like a normie. Two words: ‘Mick’ and ‘Hucknall’. The romantic image of the modern musician as tasty but troubled troubadour roving from town to town on his lonesome (except for his bandmates, backing singers, roadies, drug dealer and manager, of course) and taking sensual solace where he may is a powerful one, long propagated by he-sluts who would be intimate with a jack-in-the-box if it looked at them the right way.

You can always rely on theatreland to serve up drama off stage as well as on. Hopefully the spat between Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir David Hare over whether musicals are ‘killing’ theatre will run and run.  Writing in The Spectator last week, Hare moaned: ‘Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path… are dramatists not writing enough good plays which can attract 800 people a night? Will well-known actors not appear in them? Or did producers mislay their balls during lockdown?

Before the Sussexes – before the Grabdication was a twinkle in Meghan’s crocodile eye – there was Sarah, Duchess of York; greedy, grasping, grubby Fergie. Some see Diana as when the stiff upper lip of heritage royalty became the trembling lower lip of the new breed. But the Princess of Wales was a teenage virgin with a headful of dreams lured into a marriage in which she was a breeding machine with a man who was still in love with his ex; this would have made any woman with spirit react. No, Diana was a hard worker with an attractive dash of spite – that revenge dress, that three-in-this-marriage quip – which stopped her from presenting herself as an all-round victim.

Three weeks after that South Park episode and the memes just keep on coming. Despite years of highly articulate fulminating against the preposterous pair by essayists like myself, there’s a feeling that the satirical cartoon was the conclusive blow to the Sussexes' reputation – no well-turned phrase will ever better the glorious awfulness of ‘The Worldwide Privacy Tour’. One of the things that the woke hate most about our lot is the fact that we’re far more amusing. Their natural mode of address is to scold – and scolding and wit are polar opposites. I daresay some clown somewhere has stated that punchlines are probably imperialist.

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs ('madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

Hearing about the death of Burt Bacharach at the age of 94, I thought of one word: maestro. The word is variously defined as ‘a master, usually in an art’ (Merriam-Webster) or ‘a man who is very skilled at playing or conducting’ (Cambridge), but my favourite is the beautiful simplicity of the Longman definition: ‘Someone who can do something very well.’ The good (Brian Wilson: ‘He was a hero of mine and very influential on my work… he was a giant’), the bad (Billy Corgan: ‘A titan of beautiful and effortless song’) and the ugly (Mick Hucknall: ‘Farewell, genius’) of the music business spoke as one on this loss, with my favourite post coming from Noel Gallagher: ‘RIP Maestro. It was a pleasure to have known you.