Julie Burchill

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.

Was I the only person who felt a flash of disappointment when a source said of the imminent Girls Aloud re-union that ‘No one wants it to be a catfight’? Obvs I don’t just want a catfight – they’re the best girl group ever, so they are artists and women of substance. But just a bit of a catfight, maybe? I’ve had a soft spot for catfights since I was a child; I saw loads at the rough comprehensive school I attended between the older girls - they’d always take their earrings out first and hand them to their best friend to hold, which I found unspeakably glamorous. One of the few disappointments of having been so upwardly mobile during one’s long and lush life is that one never got to see such scraps at one’s watering holes of choice.

Like most clever people, I’m not over-fussed about clothing; there have been numerous studies showing that successful types – unless they’re in entertainment, showbiz or fashion itself, obvs – tend to wear the same thing every day. Whenever I hear the phrase ‘I like to express myself through what I wear’ I know we’re dealing with a dim bulb – how about expressing yourself through, I don’t know, your words and your actions? Fran Lebowitz once said ‘If people don’t want to talk to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your clothes?’ and though she was referring specifically to slogan T-shirts, I often think of it when I see people dressed in an ‘interesting’ manner.

We’re all wise to those phoney rotters who hold ‘luxury beliefs’ – the excellent phrase coined by the social commentator Rob Henderson in 2019 to describe ‘the modern trend among affluent Americans to use their beliefs as a way to display their social status… a belief held or espoused in order to signal that a person belongs to an elite class’. I’ve recently noticed a new side-effect of extreme privilege; luxury self-deprecation, as seen principally in actors who diss their own vehicles (if old) or express dismay at becoming famous (if young). I call them the Slamming Hams – Shams for short.

Due to my rather efficacious dabbling in semaglutides last summer, I’m currently on the mailing list of several online pharmacies, and the other day I received an email making me aware of the existence of ‘fit notes’ – ‘formerly known as sick notes’ – following ‘an appropriate online consultation with one of our GPs’. The consultation alone would cost me £14.95 and should I receive validation as an invalid, a ‘fit note’ would then be offered to me for £19.95, so that’s the best part of £35 quid in order to pull a sickie.

I’ve always admired Israeli women. Though I didn’t see any in the flesh before my first trip to the Promised Land 20 years ago, at Sunday School I far preferred the complex women of the Old Testament – Deborah the judge, Yael the assassin, Ruth the first philo-Semite – to the repenting hookers and grieving mothers of the New. The book of Exodus revolves around the actions of five women; the Talmud teaches that ‘the Jewish people were redeemed from Egypt because of the merit of the righteous women of that generation’.

I’ve never been keen on pagans. They strike me as attention seekers with no actual merits to boast of except saying that they don’t believe in organised religion – something most of us got over at 15. Claiming to be a pagan is also a way of hinting that you’re having better sex than everybody else, whereas the reality is rather like that of those alleged ‘witches’ who oft appeared in the News of the World when I was a child. Middle-aged suburban swingers sporting pendulous breasts and maternal thighs, posing coyly inside a pentagram – and the women were just as bad.

It can’t be any fun to have lung cancer as Dame Esther Rantzen does; I watched my father die from mesothelioma over the best part of a decade, and in the last couple of years this once tall, handsome, athletic man was more or less a tumour on legs. But I recall the zest with which he greeted each day, and the pleasure he took in seeing the seasons change. Once I said to him, in a fit of drunken sentiment, ‘Dad, if it ever gets too much… you do have a lot of pills, don’t you?’ He looked at me, shocked, then called to my mum while winking at me, ‘Get in ‘ere quick, Bette – our daughter wants to kill me!

Christmas means different things to different people; for Mary Sue, it will be yet another excuse to queen it over her friends. Her Christmas pudding will have been made from scratch, her carefully curated tree decorations will tell myriad stories of a perfect home life, her tasteful National Trust Christmas cards will have been sent out on 1 December. To queen it over her acquaintances, enemies and admirers, rather – for Mary Sues have no friends. They’re far too awful. Do you know a Mary Sue – a self-adoring paragon of virtue who can only ever admit to faults which are actually boasts in disguise? Mary Sues are ‘perfectionists’ or ‘too passionate’ – but never, ever lazy or liars, envious or spiteful.