The indiscreet charm of Julie Burchill

One of the downsides of getting older is witnessing your friends and acquaintances being honoured in various ways. I don’t just mean knighthoods and peerages, I also mind the little things — an entry in Who’s Who, for instance, or an honorary degree from a red-brick university. It’s reached such a point that I daresay I’ll feel a pang of envy when I see their obituaries in the Times. ‘That should be me taking up all those column inches, not them,’ I’ll think, before realising what I’m wishing for.

So you can imagine how I felt when I heard that Julie Burchill was going to be on Desert Island Discs. Burchill! I’ve known her, on and off, since I was 19, when she moved in with Cosmo Landesman, my next-door neighbour. We became best friends and remained close until 1995 when we fell out over the Modern Review, a magazine we’d started together.