Julie Burchill is a writer living in Brighton. Her Substack is julieburchill.substack.com.
When I was a young woman in the 1980s, videotape was the new-fangled entertainment form; on evenings in, my second husband and I liked nothing better than to whack in a VHS and record something off the the telly. We felt like we were in The Jetsons – though seen with a modern eye, we
There’s a ghastly predictability to the news that the University of Sussex – in Brighton, naturally – wants to set aside nearly half of its land for ‘rewilding’. According to our local paper, the Argus : ‘The University of Sussex will rewild 42 per cent of its campus land in a move which aims to promote more biodiversity, achieved by
Reading that a 16-year-old autistic girl had been dragged from her home by seven cops after reportedly saying a female officer looked like ‘a lesbian like nana’, I had to check that we weren’t back in the 1970s of my girlhood when ‘lezzer’ was the worst thing you could call a woman. Once again we
When you’re short-sighted, everyone seems attractive; for this reason, I don’t often wear my glasses, as I think myopia has a felicitous effect on my attitude to life. However, after a whopping 28 years living in Brighton & Hove, it’s dawning on me that this has coloured my view of my adopted hometown too. I
I felt a flash of affection reading that Boris Johnson’s plan to build an outdoor swimming pool at his second home in Oxfordshire may be stalled by the presence of great crested newts. What a very Bojo situation; seeing the big picture, seeking fun, determined to do things large – but hampered all the way.
Remember when we all loved Lizzo? In 2019 ‘Juice’ (the last great party anthem BP – Before Pandemic) was a thrilling throwback groove, variously described as ‘delightfully outrageous’ and ‘a self-esteem boosting anthem’. Having lived in her car at one point during years of rejection from the music industry – partly for not possessing the
When I was a girl in the 1970s, we didn’t have a car. We always took the train from our home in Bristol to the deep west of Devon and Cornwall. But when I got together with my third husband in 1995, I discovered the joy of driving — or rather, being driven, as I
Wading into the Sadiq Khan #HaveAWord brouhaha, Laurence Fox had a pop at Khan’s ally Romesh Ranganathan thus: ‘You are not a “comedian” #Maaate’. The dig came after Ranganathan teamed up with the London mayor in his campaign urging men to challenge their mates on their behaviour towards women. Fox had a point; when is
It started with That Song on the World Service in the early hours, the one I’ve always loathed; for me it symbolises the start of the state we’re in now whereby perfectly good toe-tappers are routinely strung out in slo-mo by interpreters for whom misery passes as creativity. OK, the Prince original wasn’t exactly a
When a public figure is in danger of annoying me so much that it risks impinging on my quality of life, there’s an easy trick I play on myself in order to put the irritant back into their box and into perspective. Rather than take them seriously, I simply reframe them as a comic creation
Jane Birkin, who died this week at the age of 76, appeared to be a delightful woman – attractive, adventurous and stoic. Nevertheless, I had to look twice at the Daily Mail headline on Monday which screeched ‘Jane Birkin, a true style icon who put today’s trashy celebs to shame’. Are they talking about the same
BeKind is one of the Great Icks – to use the vivid word so beloved of Love Islanders – of our age. It’s a form of brainwashing which is particularly insidious as it’s generally applied to females, starting out in childhood when numerous items of BE KIND clothing can be found in the girls’ section
In an interesting piece for Air Mail, Linda Wells writes of ‘The secret lives of tanorexics’, asking: ‘What drives these bronze obsessives – and why won’t they ever learn?’ She questions her sun-baked friends about why they are so intent on doing a thing which they are warned will ruin their complexions and make it
When I was a girl, sportsmen were amiable dolts. If they were old-school, they liked blokes and beer; if switched-on, they liked boogieing with blondes at Tramp and dreamt of opening boutiques. But with both, you could rely on them never to let you know what they were thinking about the three-day week or the
On my 20th birthday, I locked myself in the bathroom of my bungalow in Billericay and cried. Having achieved my dream – becoming a published writer – at the tender age of 17, I thought it was all downhill from there. Yes, some of this had to do with marrying the first man I had
It’s generally agreed that sex-selection is a Bad Thing. In India and China, sons are favoured over daughters – but so are they in the USA, where the margin has only moved a few points since the 1940s; 38 per to 24 per cent then, 36 per cent to 28 per cent now. Not surprisingly
As an erstwhile fellow peddler of dirty books (Ambition, 1989), I’m in two minds about E.L. James. On the one hand, I’m glad that I never made money writing tosh which led legions of gullible women to collude in their own humiliation. Granted, my heroine had SOLD tattooed on her forehead, but so far as
It’s not news that we live in a New Medieval age of Magical Thinking, when the Enlightenment is seen as the start of hate-speech, feelings must always overrule facts and ‘transubstantiation’ has taken on a whole new meaning. Men can become women simply by wishing it so, the BBC instructs its staff that there are 150 genders
Is anyone actually watching the Oscars anymore? Until ‘The Incident’ between Messrs Smith and Rock last year the direction of travel was clear. Between 2014 and 2020 the televised Academy Awards lost almost half their viewers, the number falling from 43 to 23 million. This year, in March, they were at 18 million with punters
Seeing Boris Johnson’s byline in the Daily Mail, I felt a flare of the affection which made me break free from my blue-collar tribalism and vote Tory for the first time in 2019. I remember thinking that the experience was rather like losing one’s virginity; worrying about it for months, then secretly planning it, then
