Julie Burchill

I was once a fan of The Archers, to the extent that the Guardian quoted me in 2007 outlining how ‘an unlikely combination of support from the Queen and Julie Burchill led to the transformation of Britain's 'everyday story of country folk' from a dull and tired format to its present cult status.’ Apparently I wrote that ‘No longer are the women of Ambridge stuck with 'the gallons of greengage jam that the old-guard male scriptwriters kept them occupied with for over 20 years.' The BBC seems determined to educate listeners whom they think are ignorant Look, I know I was taking a lot of drugs back then and my judgement wasn’t the best; witness the pair of jokers I’d been married to already!

It’s been a lovely month so far for us free-thinkers, with the wokescreen tumbling down big-time. First the predicted winner of the Best ‘Actress’ Oscar – a biological man – was revealed to have been a bit of a social media ‘scamp’ in the past, with a soft spot for Hitler. And now the popular modern singer ‘Stormzy’ (real name, the rather beautiful Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr) has blotted his copybook – gloriously so. I don’t think much of his songs (‘Gals say I'm rude, they wanna see me nude/My name stiff chocolate, I got nothing left to prove… Gettin' freaky in the sheets, we're takin' body shots/Then I finish with a facial just to top it off’) but then I doubt whether 65-year-old cripples are his demographic.

There are some Rude Awokening moments – when the whole damn #BeKind shebang collapses in on itself – that are so perfect, so freakishly unlikely, that they might be mistaken for a fever-dream on the part of we free thinkers. Often, because of their inherent silliness, the ‘trans community’ are involved in some way.  I’m thinking, for example, of the holier-than-thou trans-ally and persecutor of gender-realist women Damien Barr who in 2020 led a campaign to have Emma Nicholson, then honorary vice-president of the Booker Prize, removed for ‘homophobic views’. He was then revealed to have tweeted, to quote the BBC, ‘derogatory terms to refer to transsexuals on social media.

One of the worst ways to form a good first impression of someone is when they’re chasing the same woman as you, so in the interests of total clarity I’ll divulge that the first – and only – time I met Neil Gaiman was way back in the twentieth century, at the Groucho Club, when we were both after the late Kathy Acker. (I wanted to hurl when he called her ‘Tweetie Pie’.) I’ll tell my Acker story first because it’s a funny one. That Christmas she was a guest at a lunch at my bohemian in-laws. My second husband’s mother had failed to turn the stove on, thanks to an even greater cannabis fog than usual, and so lunch wasn’t served until dusk. As the afternoon wore on, and the brandy and Babycham ran out, I began to feel…warmly, shall we say, towards Miss Acker.

What’s the greatest divide in life? Is it between the dumb and the clever, the rich and the poor, the ugly and the beautiful? All have their points, but in my opinion it’s between those who can make a living doing a thing they love and those who do a job they don’t particularly care for. I don’t believe that anything else comes near deciding whether or not you’ll be consistently happy with your life. Personally, I have never stopped being delighted by the fact that, from the ages of 17 to 65 – even lying in bed as a newly-minted cripple – I can earn my living by writing. It’s all I ever wanted to do.

Looking back on the Queen’s 1992 ‘annus horribilis’, the events involved – though surprising at the time – seem almost staid now. The wife of her favourite son was photographed canoodling with an American. Her daughter divorced. Her daughter-in-law was the co-creator of a frank book about the sorrows of her marriage to the Queen’s eldest son, and to top it off, Windsor Castle burnt down. There’s a whiff of Sunset Boulevard about the isolated pair as they flail around wondering where to go next Three decades on, there’s a marked difference between the Queen’s awful year and that of her grandson, Prince Harry. The Queen’s year might have happened to anyone who had a bit of bad luck and a lot of castles.

I’m not the biggest Donald Trump fan, so I surprised myself by being pleased when he won the American election so conclusively. There was a serious reason for this. Though I’m thoroughly for abortion and against sex pests, it’s no good the Democrats pretending to be the party of women’s rights when they’re in favour of allowing cheating males into female sport and perverted men into female prisons. This isn’t feminism at all, but what I’ve dubbed ‘Frankenfeminism’ which ends up making life both less fun and less safe for women – and that’s a rotten combo.

I still remember the day when, as an adult in my twenties, I was informed by a well-wisher that Aslan from The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe was really Jesus. As this was before my religious awakening, and I was quite the militant atheist at the time, I became rather irate at this revelation. How dare ‘they’ slip a moral message in amongst all that magic and wonder! Now, of course, I see that compared to the story of Christianity itself, a bunch of talking critters is very pedestrian stuff indeed.