Julie Burchill

When I think about love, that old line by William Goldman about Hollywood comes back to me: Nobody knows anything. It seems that as we grow franker about sex (witness the Naked Attraction TV show, recently described as ‘Blind Date in a brothel’) love reveals less of its mysteries. Just as we’ve all now seen on screen 1001 ways to kill someone and yet know nothing about death, we now know 69 ways to screw someone - once more, often seen on screen for the less adventurous amongst us - and nothing about love. Not even the most basic stuff - how to avoid falling in love with someone we shouldn’t, or how to stay in love with someone we should.

I've never seen a National Treasure whose head I didn’t have a strong urge to shove down the nearest toilet. So when I read that Christopher Biggins had entered the latest Celebrity Big Brother house for a rumoured £150,000 - far, far less than what I was offered, to put it mildly - I fair hugged myself with glee at how cheap they’d got him. I had every reason to dislike him already; many years ago, when I was showing off about what I’d be like if I was a gay man - ‘Rupert Everett, probably, or Oscar Wilde, or Arthur Rimbaud’ - my husband fixed me with a cold glare (for he dislikes bragging, which often makes me wonder why he married me) and said ‘No - you’d be like Christopher Biggins.

Ever since Friday’s Glorious Victory, one of the chief recreation activities of we Brexiters of a childish bent has been the Taunting Of The Remnants, mostly online. ‘How are you comforting yourself?’ one Facebook post asked. ‘In the usual way - with the tears of the vanquished,’ I replied. ONLY ONE LIKE! For self-proclaimed ‘progressives’, what a bunch of doom-mongering, curtain-twitching, tut-tutting stick-in-the-muds they’ve proved to be! For this Remnant Zombie Army, out to do in our brains with their bed-wetting ways and bleats for more referenda until they get the result they want, everything that goes wrong over the next few months – the weather, the football – will be Brexit's fault.

Let me start by putting my podgy little hand up - the one not ferreting fervently through a big box of Belgian chocs, that is. Starting out positively sylph-like, I’ve reached a size 18 at the age of 56 solely through lack of discipline and love of pleasure. I have no time for people (except those with proven medical conditions) who pretend that it is generally otherwise. Nevertheless, I’m not attached to my flab in any way but the most obvious.  I despise the Righteous Fat. (The Righteous Thin are bad enough, all that running around, sweating and smelling, and somehow believing that it means something.

I consider myself such an extreme feminist that I make Germaine Greer look like Greer Garson. (Ask your gran.) But this doesn’t mean that I have to believe women are superior to men in every way. Yes, we violently attack, sexually assault and feel the need to commit murder far less than they do. But when it comes to the little things, there are many ways in which manning up would make women better. Maturity is one of them. We are told from the get-go that females ‘mature’ far earlier than males. It’s weird that feminists go along with this, because it’s one of the main justifications for adult men having sex with female children: ‘She looked at least 18, your honour!

I must admit to snigger-spitting my Sugar Smacks recently as I read an interview with Eddie Izzard in the Times. (Odd, because he’s never made me laugh before.) He spoke thus: ‘I would have been a soldier if I’d knew which war I’d have to fight. I was ready to apply but when you join the armed forces you fight where you’re sent. I parked the idea.’ Later on in the interview he opines - and Izzard is a proper Opiner, whereas most of us just say things - 'Fears are there to be conquered. I’ve gone from playing the streets of London to the Hollywood Bowl. But the biggest thing I ever did was walk out of the door 31 years ago in heels and make-up.

I was interested to read recently that Her Majesty The Queen’s party planner, Lady Elizabeth Anson, makes a point of putting boring guests together as ‘They don’t realise they’re the bores, and they’re happy.’ Knowing what passes for sparkling wit among the English aristocracy, this did make me chuckle - the social Siberians are probably the interesting ones, and the rest of the guests are too busy boring on about hunting and shooting to get it. For what is a bore? - nothing more than someone we personally find uninteresting. But what if we’re boring, and we just don’t get them?

I’ll never forget the first 'Funisher' I met. It was sometime in the late 1980s when you could meet all sorts of interesting girls. She was one of the moderately attractive, moderately intelligent broads the media has always been jam-packed with, the on-off up-down girlfriend of a male mate of mine, and one night she was annoyed by some roué writer who seemed to think he had droit du seigneur over all the PR girls at his publishing house, of which she was one. She fussed and fumed about it for a bit, then three vodkatinis in, a serene smile swallowed her face and she said ‘I know how to punish him - I'll have sex with him!’ My second husband couldn’t help exclaiming ‘Gee, I wish women had punished me like that when I was single!

I’ve pointed out before that to be a woman who sucks up to Islamic extremists is to be a somewhat upmarket but equally self-deluded political equivalent of those strange women who write love-letters to incarcerated rapists and serial killers of women. I’ve recently spotted another septic sister-under-the-skin, though I imagine this one will be better-dressed and better-read. She is the consumer of the recent glut of ‘Death of a Woman as Hipster Diversion’ programmes: Serial, Undisclosed, Making A Murderer, The Jinx. This is true crime for those who know how to pronounce quinoa, but it is no less nasty a habit. Those who indulge in this particular 'guilty pleasure' should, indeed, feel guilty about it.

Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter, and from the comments you’d have thought that I’d shot, cooked and eaten Shergar the Racehorse. But I stand by what I said. Like Princess Diana and Nookie the Bear before him, Bowie was not some selfless saint; he was a sharp-eyed, ambitious creature who once floated himself on the Stock Market in the 1990s, and sold himself for the advertising shilling - when already a millionaire many times over - in 2006 to a bottled water company.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3" title="Julie Burchill and Tim Stanley discuss Brighton's Brideshead set" startat=1352] Listen [/audioplayer]My adopted hometown of Brighton and Hove has always had a somewhat well-to-do image, it’s fair to say. Though we have pockets of poverty, I was surprised by the size of the houses and gardens — room for a pony! — when I started going to house parties on the notorious Whitehawk estate. The old Cockney phrase ‘You think your aunt’s come up from Brighton!’ to denote a person who is free and easy with their money pays tribute to this agreeable state of affairs. But although B&H may appear affluent, it hasn’t really been posh since the Prince Regent pushed off.