Julie Burchill

When I was a girl, around 13 or so, my mum started calling me, half-enviously, half-fondly, ‘The Camel’, due to my ability to retain water. Every Saturday morning we’d go shopping at the Bristol city centre department stores; she’d need the toilet maybe three times, but I wouldn’t need it at all. ‘Have you “been”?’ she’d ask me before we left the house. ‘No!’ I’d snicker, spitefully. When we got home after four hours out, I’d make a point of sprawling on the stairs, chugging Corona cherryade by the gallon and gossiping with a mate for around an hour before I finally ‘made my toilette’. It became part of the war of attrition which is so common between mothers and daughters.

Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected drunk’ and ‘ill-tempered’. It’s only once in a blue moon that someone really says what they think, like when the ‘social influencer’ Jameela Jamil barely waited until the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld was cold in his casket before X-ing that the capering clown – widely being celebrated as a ‘genius’ – was in fact ‘a racist, misogynistic, fat-phobic rape apologist who shouldn’t be posted all over the internet as a saint gone-too-soon’.

Waking up to hear the ‘unprecedented’ news about Heathrow Airport, I felt a nanosecond of luxurious relaxation (albeit I’m not exactly over the moon about being in a hospital bed without the use of my legs). Of course I’d rather be scampering about an airport superstore being sprayed with scent by sexy shop-girls rather than stuck here waiting to be hoisted into the air over a commode like some smelly piñata. But there’s never any harm in looking on the bright side and I’m very glad not to have been flown all the way back to Delhi when I was on the verge of landing in TW6, as was one young woman on the Today programme last week.

I’ve never cared about status symbols, because my talent is the only one I need, so of course I wasn’t concerned with mobile phones, which were once tremendous markers of rank. Since then, not having a smartphone (or pretending not to) has become a thing some high-status people boast about now that 95 per cent of the UK adult population (and a great deal of the child population) own them. Ed Sheeran claims to have dumped his in 2015, Elton John describes himself as a Luddite, while Simon Cowell sensibly told the Mail on Sunday way back in 2007: ‘It was actually stopping me from working or living properly, so I just turned it off and I went a month, three months, then a year, then two years, then three years and I love it…it’s absolutely made me happier.

According to MailOnline, Kate Moss ‘sparked fan concern as she’s spotted looking “fraught” and “on edge” at Paris Fashion Week’. Good. Kate Moss is one of the very rare celebrities who I’m interested in – because she’s one of the very few celebrities who’s interesting – but in recent years she has become a bit ‘basic’, to use the word she once tossed along with ‘bitch’ at the pilot of the EasyJet plane. Police led her away from the plane after she was caught drinking her own booze after being refused airline hooch. (‘She was not aggressive to anyone and was funny really – the crew were acting out of proportion’, said a co-passenger.

Any old fossil like me keen on harrumphing that popular music isn’t what it used to be will have taken a certain snarky pleasure on reading that, last year, no British act figured in the world’s top ten singles or albums for the first time since 2003. To be fair, 2003 wasn’t the best year for chart music ever; Dido had the top-selling album – going 6x platinum – with Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Daniel Bedingfield and Norah Jones completing the top five. The bestselling single of 2003 was the Black Eyed Peas’ ‘Where is the Love?’, followed by ‘Spirit in the Sky’ by Gareth Gates and the Kumars, R. Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ (Remix)’, ‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules and ‘Leave Right Now’ by Will Young.

I’ve been in hospital, bed-bound, for six weeks; because I can write it’s not so bad, but between deadlines time passes slowly, so landmarks in the day come to mean a lot. Most of all, I look forward to my husband visiting at 3 p.m.; secondly, the meds trolley trundling towards me like a dear old open-handed friend at 9 a.m. – but a close third must be the bell which announces the arrival of meals: breakfast at 7 a.m., lunch at 12 p.m., dinner at 5 p.m. In the first bay I stayed in, I always made my ward-mates laugh by squealing with genuine glee when I heard it.

I’ve always liked the old Winston Churchill maxim ‘Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down’. After a month lying down in hospital, contemplating life without the use of my legs, I now utter a laugh which I hope is suitably hollow. O, my lovely legs! By the time I was 14, they were the longest in my class; by the time I was 17 they had embarked on the merry dance that has been my ‘journey’, propelling me forever onwards towards enough fun, love and money for nine lifetimes. Now I feel like a mermaid – without the sexiness – and my shameless gams are but a floppy old mono-thing.

In theory, I don’t care for actors – all that pontificating about climate change while taking private jets – but in practice, I find them great fun. One of my dearest friends, a small-screen siren, loves regaling me with tales of her shockers, like an American mini-series with a huge budget but an appalling script. ‘we were being housed in fabulous hotels, dined every night on fine food and wine so we shut up and took the coin. If you agree to do a job, even if you realise halfway through that it’s a pile, do it with good grace – learn from it and move on. But sometimes you have to consult your fellow actors and say “How the hell am I going to say this?” – it can create a great Dunkirk atmosphere.