Julie Burchill

There are quite a few ‘theories’ (what the middle classes call gossip nowadays) about why Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have sundered their union for a second time. Personally, I’m of the entirely uninformed opinion that one of the contributing factors may have been that Jennifer Lopez – like many a celeb – has her own alcohol line, launched last year with a suitably up-itself press release. ‘Delola world-class spirit-based ready-to-enjoy cocktails designed for a thoughtful lifestyle coming to the finest establishments.’  When the touter is teetotal, regular celebrity greed starts to look like something more malign Perhaps Lopez might have been a bit more ‘thoughtful’ about the fact that her erstwhile husband is an alcoholic – three times re-habbed.

The elegant, serpentine word ‘lesbian’ had a place in the sun only briefly. In the first real novel about lesbianism, 1928’s The Well Of Loneliness, the protagonists are gloomily and somewhat puzzlingly called ‘inverts’, conjuring up an image of some sad Sapphic wondering why she was condemned to spend her life upside-down. Amazingly, Christopher Hawtree, writing in the Telegraph in 2008, noted that the word ‘lesbian’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976: During the four decades it took to create the 12-volume Oxford English Dictionary, completed in 1928, Lesbian appeared only in reference to the island.

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic and sexual love, I thought of volatility, and that seemed hard to reconcile with vanilla sex? Or did I just conform to the type that also marks out many male masochists – I was ‘powerful’ in my realm, excellent at my job, and was curious to find out what being powerless felt like? (This last one, in the face of what I know now about how many girls and women experience powerlessness throughout the world, makes me feel shame in a way that very few things do.

The pop star Sam Smith appears not only to have a magic mirror which affirms that he’s stunning and brave, but also that he’s a lovely little thinker. During lockdown, self-isolating in his £12 million home, he filmed himself weeping because he was already bored with his own company. ‘I hate reading,’ he cried, suggesting that if you have no life of the mind, you’ll always be a bad companion to yourself – even if you do refer to yourself in the plural. Having said this, he then had the nerve to say: ‘When people mess up a pronoun or something... It kind of ruins conversations. It’s going to take time. We’re changing a language here.

Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood's young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the over-privileged, over-grown, over-thinking spoilt brat of a hero – especially when he becomes the ‘prey’ of the much older Mrs Robinson – but that the toy boy is played by the 29-year-old Dustin Hoffman and the cougar by the 35-year-old (and far more attractive) Anne Bancroft merely highlights the misogyny of the enterprise.

The day after the Serbia vs England match, while sunbathing on my balcony, I espied an interesting vignette taking place on the lawns beneath my apartment block. A little boy was playing football with a man I took to be his father, who looked like a hipster of the kind you can see by the score in Brighton and Hove; goatee, vintage t-shirt, Converse sneakers and a facial expression strongly implying that he’d been to places which made Planet Earth look like a one-horse town.  You’ve got to really love something naturally, in your bones, to hate a song about a robin The little lad was having the time of his life, kicking the ball at his dad. He was totally living in the moment. The dad? Not so much. In one hand he held a mobile phone which made him a poor goalie.

Like a lot of people who didn’t know him, I felt sad hearing of the death of Michael Mosley on the Greek island of Symi, being familiar with him as a doctor whose pleasant voice I often heard on the radio. He had the gift of giving advice without being patronising or preachy. Mosley seemed to be a wise man – and for this reason, the way he died seemed all the more shocking. I found it particularly poignant that his body was found just 30 meters from the perimeter fence of a beach resort. Somewhat sheepishly, I immediately identified with the inhabitants of the beachfront compound; if I’d have been on that island, that’s where I’d have been, flat out by the swimming pool, cocktail to hand and no trek more adventurous planned than that between beach and bar.

On reading that the Maldives are to ban Israeli passport holders from entry as an alleged protest over the war in Gaza, I hooted with laughter. That dump – I wouldn’t go there if you paid me, – which is exactly what happened in 1995, when the Sunday Times sent me abroad for the very first time. I was 35, and due to a combination of being very keen on London, where I lived, and not wanting to have extra sex with my first and second husbands (which I’d heard was probable when one went en vacances) I’d never missed visiting the rest of the world. If I wanted to swim, I’d go to Brockwell Lido; if I wanted to sunbathe, I’d go and play sardines in Soho Square. But in the honeymoon stage of my relationship with my new young mistress, I was keen to show her a good time.

I’m a highly insensitive person, which means that I’m rarely perturbed by aural excitement. I love public noise, the sound of the crowd. I would never want double-glazed windows – and I even like the sound of drills and construction because I enjoy living in a boomtown where lots of people want to be. The only noise I don’t like is that of children screeching in restaurants, pubs and bars, but that’s because I don’t believe they should be there in the first place; I love noisy adults in restaurants, having the time of their lives. Little dogs barking in these places I don’t mind – but not big ones as they look like they’re showing off. I like quiet in libraries – and that’s about it.