Julie Burchill

I must admit to being somewhat taken aback on reading – in a new survey by the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, whatever that is when it’s at home – that we women of Blighty are sadder and more ‘stressed’ than our sisters on the European mainland. Odd because I’ve always found us a cheerful bunch; after all, we were churning out the Carry On films, graced with Babs Windsor’s lusty chuckle, while French, Italian and Scandinavian film actresses were all looking like they’d lost a fiver and found a euro.

I don’t have much in common with Charlotte Church (I support the ancient state of Israel, whereas she supports Narnia; she’s still relatively young and cute, whereas this ancient mariner’s ship has sailed) but something we do share is a lifetime of extreme generosity verging on the profligate, often to people who do not deserve it. As Katie Hind’s headline in the Mail squealed recently: ‘I watched aghast as Charlotte Church's freeloading posse fleeced her in a nightclub when she was just 18 – I'm not surprised she's burned through her £25 million fortune!’  The money I spent always had the air of Monopoly money I never had £25 million, but I earned masses of money for a couple of decades in the 20th century and was a cash millionaire for a few years in the 21st.

What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing to preserve her dignity dehumanises Marilyn – and we know that being treated as a ‘thing’ contributed towards her terminal sorrow. We want to have our cheesecake and eat it, without adding the heavy weight of posthumous complicity in the death of this likeable young woman – which is what Monroe was, beneath all the glamour and the pain.

The old should envy the young; it’s part of the natural order of things. When I was young, I was gloriously aware that old people (anyone over 30) envied me; though I was a virgin until I went to That London at 17, my mum and her mates thought I was up to all sorts – and as soon as I was able to escape from my poor-but-honest home for the fleshpots of the capital, I was. Two poems by Philip Larkin sum up how old people used to feel about the younger generation.

With Owen Jones very huffily leaving the Labour party, I was moved to examine the state of The Flounce in public life de nos jours. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it thus: 1. To move with exaggerated jerky or bouncy motions (‘flounced about the room, jerking her shoulders, gesticulating’ – Agatha Christie)2. To move so as to draw attention to oneself (‘flounced into the lobby’)3. To go with sudden determination (‘flounced out in a huff’) Are we are past the glory days of flouncing?

Few things sum up the chasm between childhood and adolescence more poignantly than our changing relationship with music. One minute life is all familial cuddles and nursery rhymes – the next it’s all parental alienation and rock’n’roll. One year I was eagerly buying the records of Pinky & Perky, the next those of Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich – and the next, the records of the Velvet Underground and Nico. Nico had finally found the family’s piano and was pumping away on it as if her life depended on it My relationship with Nico – the fantasy and the reality – is one of the funniest never-meet-your-heroes experience I’ve ever had.

‘PUNK’S NOT DEAD!’ I will sometimes write as a sign-off on emails to mates when I’ve said something particularly ‘bad’. It’s something of a joke with me; although I was around the scene early on (1976) and started my career off as a 17-year-old writing about punk, I didn’t much like it. I liked black music – disco, Motown, soul; I thought that most white music was just a nasty old racket. The establishment has moved from right to left but remains sexist, snobbish and racist But I do like the phrase, implying as it does a refusal to bow down to the establishment. Although we had a Labour government from 1974, it’s fair to say that the establishment of the 1970s was a fusty right-wing thing, sexist and racist and snobbish.

As someone who was fond of Derek Draper (a feeling that probably wasn’t mutual, as I nicked his bird) it was strange to see photographs of his funeral. It seemed like a state occasion for some legendary leader who had died in battle defending his country, rather than for the husband of a likeable TV presenter who had been unlucky enough to catch a virulent version of a sickness which so many shook off. Sir Elton John sang; Sir Tony Blair speechified. Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and Alastair Campbell showed up; the Blair Bunch reunited. The dignity of Draper’s widow and children sat oddly next to this ghastly bunch of carpetbaggers, reminding us that before he found redemption, Derek became famous – notorious – for revealing the hollowness at the heart of New Labour.

Awhile back, I followed the career of the writer Elizabeth Day, but not in a good way; rather, I followed it much as a fly must have followed a muck-cart in the olden days. Her column for the Mail on Sunday, from 2018 to 2021, was quite probably the worst column ever to appear in a newspaper up to that point. I dubbed her The World’s Worst Columnist (and it wasn’t envy, as I had a cushy billet at the Sunday Telegraph at the time) and took great delight in sharing the choice cherries of triteness atop her weekly Sunday sundae of banality with my mates on social media.