Julie Burchill

You could be forgiven for thinking that it was a much-beloved member of the royal family who died ten years ago today — Princess Diana, perhaps, whose posthumous 60th birthday we recently celebrated. (This one also has her very own statue, a bronze one in her stomping ground of Camden Town.) This Jewish princess had similar problems with bulimia, and with the paparazzi, but she was a pop star, only 27 when she died, on paper with not much mainstream appeal. Yet many of us were — and are — obsessed with Amy Winehouse. She released only two albums in the space of three years, but her ghost still bestrides pop music like a tiny, tattooed colossus. When we idolise an artist, it’s tempting to make their sorrows about us.

Watching the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh at the weekend — that Land Rover, that lack of eulogy — I felt an alien emotion steal over me. Shortly after the last blast of the bagpipes faded away, I realised what it was: I’d like to be like that. Amusingly, the only person this working-class radical feminist has ever felt this emotion towards was a reactionary prince. Somehow, the very incongruity made perfect sense; I can’t think of anything drearier than having a ‘role model’ who was in any way like me. There are quite a few modern phrases which annoy the heck out of me. ‘Reaching out’ should only be used by a member of the Four Tops, while ‘Going forward’ should only be used of cars.

Seeing my hometown, Bristol, in flames this week following the violent ‘Kill the Bill’ riots, it was unrecognisable as the safe south-west city which I had dreamed of leaving since the age of 12 (when I started sleeping beneath a poster of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground map). I finally escaped to the capital in search of fame, fortune, sex and drugs at 17. When some people say ‘I don’t recognise the place’, they’re usually talking about the effects of immigration, but that’s not my experience.

As I watched the Duchess of Sussex give her extended acceptance speech for Best Performance As A Victim — played as a cross between Bambi and Beth from Little Women — my overwhelming feeling was of disappointment. Readers may recall that I once wrote long and loopy love letters to her in this very magazine, embarrassing in their unctuousness — ‘Meghan Markle has rescued her prince!’ — but I went off her when her bid for secular sainthood started. The allegations of tiara tantrums brought me fresh hope. Could it be that behind that innocent face, all damp eyes and trembling lips, lurked a superannuated Mean Girl? She’d have made such a good one. And we bitches could use the recruits.

As a proud resident of Sussex, I had to laugh when I heard that Facebook had threatened to ban references to Devil’s Dyke — the 100-metre-deep South Downs valley which has been a tourist attraction since Victorian times — for ‘violating community standards on hate speech’. The touchy bots even slapped a 48-hour ban on a man who posted a photo of a bus bearing the beauty spot’s name as a destination with the caption ‘Heading up to the Dyke’. It’s nutty, but it sparked a serious thought: where have all the lesbians gone? Just the other week the lesbian Joanna Cherry was sacked as the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for not being ‘inclusive’ enough over the issue of gender recognition.

January is when the difference between the rich and the poor becomes most evident. Whereas many people face a month plagued by the three Ds — debt, divorce and doldrums — the famous tend to take off for more clement climes. Simon Cowell famously frolics at the Sandy Lane Hotel in Barbados at the start of each new year, and I myself have spent many January days at the Ritz-Carlton — but only the one in Tenerife, because I believe in keeping it real. This winter, subdued British airports have also seen a mass exodus of a particular youth tribe recognisable by their bright white teeth and deep mahogany tans — the hordes of youngsters who are reality TV stars and/or create content for Instagram. And most of them are going to Dubai.

‘Wild’ used to be one of my favourite words. It was in all the songs I loved best — ‘Walk on the Wild Side’, ‘Wild Thing’, ‘Born to Be Wild’. How times have changed. Wild — once meaning brave, bold, reckless — is now yet another sanctimonious nag. Everyone seems to want to get in touch with their wild side. Dark green is the new black. Even vulgar Channel 5 has given us Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, in which he ‘travels to remote corners of the globe to experience extreme lifestyles with those who have left modern-day amenities behind’.

I have many fine qualities – but being a good judge of character is not one of them. Put me in a room with six saints and a psychopath and we all know who I’m going to be swearing blood-brotherhood with by the end of the evening. Interestingly, this hasn’t left me feeling like a victim; as I’m extremely tough, reckless and self-mocking, I bounce from one inappropriate friendship to the next with no loss of enthusiasm. But most of these relationships are by their nature not conducted in the public eye. When a journalist makes a fool of themselves drooling over a famous figure who later turns out to be an ocean-going rotter, it’s a different matter.

I am that rare thing, a vice-signaller; a breed defined by the fact that unlike our virtue-signalling opposites, we delight in presenting ourselves as somewhat worse than we are. Reasons vary; sometimes we were Bad People in the past and changed but (like teenage wallflowers who grew into table-dancing divas and still describe themselves as ‘shy’) we keep an image in our mind of the way we were. Sometimes we choose to present in this way because we are repelled by people who consider themselves good but behave in a manner which we see as substandard; for example, regard the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they can never do wrong because they have ticked the box marked Brotherhood Of Man.

There’s a line in Desperately Seeking Susan where Madonna (Susan) reads aloud the diary of Roberta, the bored housewife she has swapped places with: ‘Couldn’t sleep. Went into kitchen. Gary came in, turn off light. Gary left. Finished birthday cake.’ Then she exclaims: ‘Pages of it; it’s got to be a cover — nobody’s life could be this boring!’ A related naughty thought often comes to mind when I see my chums worrying on Facebook about The Man stealing photos of their cat wearing rabbit ears or their own preferences in caffeinated beverages. If there is a stealthy cabal of shadowy figures seeking to make puppets out of us — mere paper dolls capering powerlessly at the whim of our faceless masters!