Julie Burchill

For a long time now, high fashion – with the alibi of being ‘art’ – has tried on rape, self-harm, heroin-chic and of course the simple, timeless classics of anorexia/bulimia as titillating ‘looks’. Anything to keep an enervated haute couture industry (for many years selling mainly in Russia, China and the Middle East, though post-pandemic even these are dropping off) in the headlines.   Ambiguous – to say the least – about the beauty of the female body, the mainly gay male world of high fashion has, after a brief period of pretending to embrace ‘diversity’ (anything above a size eight) returned to physiques in which any semblance of female sexual characteristics has been excised.

One of the pleasures of fiction, be it book or film, is that it can take us to actual places beyond our own national boundaries – and into other worlds which don’t exist. Think of fictional states from Narnia to (Graham) Greeneland – and Richard Curtis’ London, that parallel version of our capital seen in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, where no one has ever seen a machete and swearing is only ever done in a jolly way. When I asked on social media for suggestions as to what this world might be called, I was inundated with suggestions. Curtistan, Curtopia, Notting Shill, Notting Swill, Treacletown and Englandland were among the non-obscene ones; my husband then weighed in with Smarming, Tweeford and – my favourite – Smarming-on-Twee.

Working in a charity shop, where the Christmas cards go out in July, means I’m more aware than most how early the festive season begins these days. The postal service can be a bit erratic but surely it won’t take five months for a greeting card to reach its final destination? Our excuse is that the money we raise goes to a good cause. Regular shops don’t have the same justification. Marks & Spencer, in particular, is one of the worst offenders when it comes to Christmas. The retail equivalent of the BBC, M&S is sanctimonious and overpriced. It's a shop that thinks nothing of having Halloween merch celebrating ghouls jostling with the Christmas junk celebrating the Prince of Peace.

After last week’s revelation that James Corden was banned from a New York restaurant for being repeatedly horrible to staff, I’ve been considering the different way fat men and fat women are viewed. Fat men are invariably seen as jolly – who can imagine a thin Father Christmas? – despite the rollcall of porky evil, from Fatty Arbuckle, abuser of women, to Cyril Smith, abuser of boys. If they are well--connected drunks, fat men may also be called ‘bon viveurs’ whereas fat women are seen as ‘eating their feelings’ at best, being lazy and thick at worst.

It’s a rule of life that adults shouldn’t understand young people’s music, ever since Little Richard made the old folk fume with his incessant and enigmatic cries of ‘A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-lop-bam-boom!’ I bitterly recall when during my adolescence my father – a highly respectable Communist factory-hand who would rather have voted Tory than sworn in front of a woman – took a mysterious liking to all the outrageous acts I was crazy for, from Roxy Music to Sparks. Having been driven to find ever more unwholesome combos, the final straw came when, one Sunday morning, I was lying in bed when I heard the strains of my precious Velvet Underground album – WITH THE ANDY WARHOL BANANA COVER! – floating up the stairs.

It was Depp vs Heard and Best Of Breed at Crufts rolled into one: yes, the Wagatha Christie gravy-train came to a screeching halt yesterday having taken three years and £3 million in lawyers’ fees to reach the terminus. And with it, Rebekah Vardy’s reputation as a Cool Girl hit the buffers. I was vaguely on Team Vardy to start with; childhood abuse, broken home, homeless at 15, teenage bride, three times married, mother of five, eventually finding fame, fortune and Fendi by marrying Jamie Vardy. Coleen, on the other hand, seemed the boring good girl who had been with Wayne since they were schoolmates – before he had money, even, thus confounding those who might ask ‘What attracted you to befuddled, brothel-creeping multi-millionaire Wayne Rooney?

‘We don’t need another hero,’ sang Tina Turner back in the sexy-greedy 1980s. How times have changed. These days we have Superheroes Are Everywhere, a children’s book written by the Vice-President of the USA, Kamala Harris. Puffs tell us that ‘the book teaches that superheroes can be found everywhere in real life, from family members, to friends, to teachers at school and college’ and that it is an ‘encouraging, uplifting book [which] inspires kids to recognise the super-heroes all around them and promise to be, like them, brave, kind, helpful, and more’.

Growing up, I didn’t really think about the police until I got caught shoplifting at the age of 14. Separated from my comrades in the five-finger-discount crusade, I was stuck in a cell for half an hour but the earache only started when my furious parents came to collect me. I almost asked the kind policeman if I might stay overnight until they’d calmed down. I wouldn’t do that now. Though I know that the vast majority of police are decent people, they also seem to harbour an unusually high number of woman-haters. Why do so many perverts join the police?