Julie Burchill

Working in a charity shop, where the Christmas cards go out in July, means I’m more aware than most how early the festive season begins these days. The postal service can be a bit erratic but surely it won’t take five months for a greeting card to reach its final destination? Our excuse is that the money we raise goes to a good cause. Regular shops don’t have the same justification. Marks & Spencer, in particular, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to Christmas. The retail equivalent of the BBC, M&S is sanctimonious and overpriced. It's a shop that thinks nothing of having Halloween merch celebrating ghouls jostling with the Christmas junk celebrating the Prince of Peace.

After last week’s revelation that James Corden was banned from a New York restaurant for being repeatedly horrible to staff, I’ve been considering the different way fat men and fat women are viewed. Fat men are invariably seen as jolly – who can imagine a thin Father Christmas? – despite the rollcall of porky evil, from Fatty Arbuckle, abuser of women, to Cyril Smith, abuser of boys. If they are well--connected drunks, fat men may also be called ‘bon viveurs’ whereas fat women are seen as ‘eating their feelings’ at best, being lazy and thick at worst.

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album – WITH THE ANDY WARHOL BANANA COVER! – floating up the stairs.

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money, even, thus confounding those who might ask ‘What attracted you to befuddled, brothel-creeping multi-millionaire Wayne Rooney?

‘We don’t need another hero,’ sang Tina Turner back in the sexy-greedy 1980s. How times have changed. These days we have Superheroes Are Everywhere, a children’s book written by the Vice-President of the USA, Kamala Harris. Puffs tell us that ‘the book teaches that superheroes can be found everywhere in real life, from family members, to friends, to teachers at school and college’ and that it is an ‘encouraging, uplifting book [which] inspires kids to recognise the super-heroes all around them and promise to be, like them, brave, kind, helpful, and more’.

Growing up, I didn’t really think about the police until I got caught shoplifting at the age of 14. Separated from my comrades in the five-finger-discount crusade, I was stuck in a cell for half an hour but the earache only started when my furious parents came to collect me. I almost asked the kind policeman if I might stay overnight until they’d calmed down. I wouldn’t do that now. Though I know that the vast majority of police are decent people, they also seem to harbour an unusually high number of woman-haters. Why do so many perverts join the police?

It seems incredible that, 45 years ago, a pop group – the Sex Pistols – could release a record on a respectable label (A&M, founded by Herb Alpert, home of the Carpenters) in which they claimed, probably somewhat rashly, that our glorious monarch was not a human being. These days such sentiments are confined to the outer reaches of conspiracy theory nuttiness. I recall the politician William Hamilton, who nowadays would be very unlikely to be elected, forever popping up on prime time television calling the Queen ‘a clockwork doll’, Princess Margaret ‘a floozy’ and Prince Charles ‘a twerp’. Oddly, as society has become less deferential, it appears to have become more monarchist.

For the first few weeks of watching Johnny Depp and Amber Heard attempt to turn each other into twelve cans of cat food, it felt like some silly if savage sideshow. But as the defamation trial dragged on, it became obvious there was something unusually grotesque about this case; as with a boxing match, turning the spotlight on the audience revealed even more ugliness than that which was taking place in the arena. Samuel Butler wrote about his friend Thomas Carlyle: ‘It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.’ Both Heard and Depp would appear to be nightmares to be married to – but there was a very real imbalance in the abuse aimed at each of them.