I first met Caitlin Moran at Julie Burchill’s flat in Bloomsbury. This was in the early 1990s and she was a precocious teenager who’d written a play and published a few pieces. Julie had asked her to write for the Modern Review, a magazine I co-owned with Julie and her then husband Cosmo Landesman, and Caitlin’s stuff was really good. After that, she became a kind of junior member of our gang and I remember liking her a great deal – she was warm and funny and didn’t seem remotely intimidated by older, more experienced journalists. It was obvious that she was going to have a brilliant career.
I tried to think of something I’d said or done that could have prompted such a visceral hatred – and came up blank
Fast forward about 15 years, by which time we’d lost touch, and I was somewhat taken aback by her reaction to my appearance on a BBC2 discussion programme with Germaine Greer.
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