Julie Burchill

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.

Seeing the snaps of David Beckham, Victoria in tow, smirking like the cat that got the cream-covered canary at the King’s state banquet for the Qatari royals, I was in two minds. It pleased me to think of Meghan angrily slamming the doors of her 17 toilets, as the trophy couple the Sussexes once saw as friends so firmly showed their allegiance in the ongoing War of the Windsors. But on the other hand, there’s something rather unappealing about a monarchy which sups with showbiz, using a short spoon. We’ve just seen in the example of the American election how profoundly unimpressed people are when the powerful, rich and famous flock together too much, when entertainers get too chummy with people who are there as representatives of a nation.

On hearing that the Groucho Club has been closed after the Metropolitan Police alleged ‘a recent serious criminal offence’, I felt a shiver of something I wasn’t quite sure of – one part sorrow, one part joy, shaken over ice-cold memories and served straight up. To some, the Groucho might have been some poncy private members' club but for me – from 1985 to 1995, between the ages of 25 and 35 – it was where I struck deals and enemies, fell in love with pretty strangers and went off those to whom I had promised to be true. The Groucho is where I became ‘Julie Burchill’, for better or worse.

It’s not just that the lunatics – sorry, ‘neuro-diverse’ – have taken over the asylum. They’ve taken over the asylum and started walking on their hands, and they’re determined to make us do the same or feel ashamed for staying the right way up. That is what I thought, anyway, when I read that children as young as nine are being cautioned by the police for calling each other names in the playground. Half a century later, at 65, I have extremely high self-esteem The correct way to counter name-calling is either to hurl them back or ignore them. As a teenager, I was occasionally called a ‘witch’ by schoolmates because of my big nose. Sometimes I simply stuck my massive beak in the air and flounced past, sometimes I retorted with an observation about my accuser.

I love hotels. Growing up, my family never stayed in them (we were poor but we were honest, M’Lud). Instead we went to Butlin's, sharing a tiny ‘chalet’, or we stayed at bed and breakfasts; private lodgings where you got exactly those two things but had to be out and about during the daylight hours – come hell, high water or hailstones. For those too young to have experienced them, a B&B is basically the exact opposite of an Airbnb, where you’re allowed to stay in every single moment of every day you’ve hired it for, if that’s what turns you on. I’ve only stayed in one Airbnb, which was a houseboat in Amsterdam; I love boats and I love Amsterdam (or I did, before it went mad), but I never wanted to repeat the experience, because – hotels.

Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my theatrical endeavours over the past couple of years. Now one of them has left to return home, I felt a sense of loss. How odd to see the likes of the Guardian favouring such red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism And to think I used to believe that Poles coming here was a bad idea.

I’ve just seen a graph which surprised me only slightly less than one might which showed that the majority of people in the UK thought that Keir Starmer could be trusted to tell the truth about what he had for breakfast. It shows that US rates of obesity have started to fall. The reason, according to the Financial Times, which published the graph, is that one in eight Americans is now taking semaglutides, drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. I’ll state right here that I’ve got flesh in the game – though a good deal less than I did before I encountered the wonderful world of semaglutides. I wrote here in the summer of 2023: I’ve had an interesting relationship with my weight. In my teens, I was so thin that my mother would cry when I went home to visit.