“The 90s: Art and Fashion”, a new exhibition about the decade, opens next week at the Tate Britain. That it is curated by Edward Enninful may strike one with delight or dismay, depending on one’s opinion of him. There’s no doubt that he knows his onions. He was 18 in 1991, when he became the youngest ever fashion director of i-D magazine. He went on to become the first black, and male, editor of British Vogue, in 2018, and stayed there for six years, during which time he put the preposterous Greta Thunberg on the cover, part of his mission to make the magazine more than a hefty brick composed of photos of expensive frocks and even more expensive advertising.

Yet if Enninful came out with the usual platitudes about how he aimed to bring “diversity” to the institution, it’s a shame that as late as 2018, Vogue didn’t pay its interns, thus seeing to it that only youngsters from wealthy backgrounds and/or with family homes in London could afford to work there. So it is with the awareness of a certain level of virtue-signaling hogwash that one must approach anything “curated” by Edward Enninful.

Suggested Reading

Britain’s Britpop hangover

By Aris Roussinos

When we consider the Nineties, most of us immediately think of Cool Britannia, Young British Artists, Brit Pop and Geri Halliwell’s Union Jack mini. It was an unashamedly patriotic time, with the national flag being treated as cool and harmless in a way it hadn’t been since the Sixties; think Harold Wilson’s “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, but featuring pop stars instead of secretaries. But just as every superhero must now have A Dark Side — which seemed kind of interesting the first few times it was done, but now has the heavy hand of Author’s Message with a side-dish of scolding — so must every decade. The Nineties didn’t feel like a dark decade, certainly compared to decades full of foreboding, like the Thirties, or indeed right here, right now.

Yet Enninful’s choices seem determined not to provide simply a fun day out. In the Tate press release accompanying the exhibition, there’s a lot of earnest talk about how Nineties art tackled “agency, identity and class”, and how its artists drew attention “to those excluded largely excluded” from the Cool Britannia zeitgeist. But I’m not sure an exhibition called “Art and Fashion” is a natural prompt for political pondering, let alone reflections on a decade where, supposedly, “hierarchies were dismantled”. Some things are sacred.

The photograph which accompanies most of the advance publicity for the show is Juergen Teller’s 1998 photo of a young Kate Moss lying in bed with only (only!) her face and pink hair showing — and one can’t help feeling that it’s feel-good artifacts like this which the paying public will be flocking to see, rather than Chris Ofili’s Turner Prize-winning tribute to Stephen and Doreen Lawrence.

This, after all, was an optimistic decade, apart from a bit of silly fussing about the Millennium Bug which would make airplanes crash from the sky, a fear which seemed to sum up the childish aspect of the Nineties. (This was the decade of the PlayStation console, when grown men with decent degrees from good universities were suddenly quite happy to advertise their addiction to the adventures of Japanese cartoon characters.)  There was quite a bit of “joy” about, lots of it chemical — but, despite what the press release claims, there weren’t any “joyful queer club nights”. Back then, “queer” was just an insult which ignorant people threw at gay people, before it became a description which boring people used to make themselves feel interesting.

This was not a self-serious decade, with the ubiquitous “smiley” face gracing the raves where hugging many seemed more pleasant than sex with one. The presence of that consummate performer Tony “Things Can Only Get Better” Blair as prime minister — winning the first of three elections in 1997, bringing an end to 18 years of Tory rule — rubbed this in. This was never clearer than when, at a No. 10 reception for “the talent”, Blair allegedly joked about cocaine with Noel Gallagher. Oasis manager Alan McGee had bunged Labour £50,000, a lot back then, and said, “If I can get a million kids to vote Labour because Noel and Liam have endorsed them then I’ve done my bit”. But things weren’t all lollipops and roses (or cigarettes and booze) for long, with McGee soon grumbling that “if things don’t improve they won’t be getting my money next time”. The fashion designer Wayne Hemingway was equally snarky. “There is a very grave danger,” he said, “that by simply inviting a few (mostly naff) pop stars and comedians to drinkies at No 10, the very people Blair is trying to impress will be turned off.”

It’s never clever, then, to mix the serious with the silly, and that’s what this exhibition seems likely to do. No, the real glory of the Nineties was that there seemed a (now) extraordinary degree of freedom to do and say what one wanted to. State scolding had not become a permanent thing; weather forecasters’ warnings never got more presumptuous than a what-are-you-like snicker of “don’t forget your brolly!” We were not urged to “stay hydrated!” as though the daily commute was a trek across the Sahara, nor taught that a good summer was a harbinger of Armageddon. (The nearest we got to that was Worms Armageddon, a 1999 video game.)

More from this author

Sex, drugs and the Modern Review

By Julie Burchill

The magazine I co-founded in 1991, The Modern Review (now available to read, mostly for free, on Substack) reflected this; it’s no accident that its editor Toby Young would go on to found the Free Speech Union. Whenever youngsters today are polled about what decade would have been the best to be young in, the Nineties always score high. That’s often associated with freedom from social media, but I think generally also means freedom from thought-policing, even when they’re doing it themselves.

I suppose that even the most self-celebratory of decades looks back in languor at the past and picks out bits and pieces of it. Think of the ultra-modern Beatles, at the height of their Sixties fame, dressed up in their First World War bandsman costumes, or the old-time icons who make up the Lonely Hearts Club Band. But has a young generation ever looked back so hungrily? Jeremy Vine’s daughter got a Smiths lyric tattooed on her arm to celebrate her 18th birthday, with her dad getting the other half: “For there are brighter sides to life/ And I should know because I’ve seen them, but not very often”. Going on to enjoy an excellent solo career in the Nineties — in 1992, he sold out the Hollywood Bowl in 23 minutes, breaking The Beatles’ record — Morrissey is now one of the bold legions of the shunned and canceled, for saying things that must not be said lest some wet-wipe has the ab-dabs.

I know, of course, that it’s a mistake to say of decades that this was that and that was the other. I remember my fashion friends claiming the Eighties were all about consumerism, while the Nineties were going to be all about thoughtfulness: and that was before the Eighties had even finished. They said this without particular evidence, and for no other reason than that was what they thought should happen when a decade changed. All the same, if I was forced to, I’d say there really was a difference between the Nineties and today. Back then, we were treated as adults yet felt free to behave like children. Now, we are treated like children and feel ground down with the sorrows of adulthood. But there are brighter sides to life — and I should know, because I’ve seen them, and in better places than the walls of an art gallery.

But looking back, they were good years; I came from a very loving and secure background — an only child — and Saturday evenings watching the show as a family was one of the tableaux which seem to sum it up. The evening meal was taken early (my dad barely able to keep calm as he strode around the kitchen; he didn’t believe in women cooking, being a Communist — and a show off), I was dispatched to walk the dog until it became exhausted, my mother took extra pains with making the always immaculate lounge even more welcoming. Then we would gather to absorb the magic; talking was frowned upon and as for anything as daft as screaming at the Daleks or hiding behind the sofa, forget it — this was a serious business. After my teenage rebellion, I avoided anything to do with Dr Who for decades — but on discovering that my third husband was a Whovian, it was kind of like coming home. When one of my favorite actors, Christopher Eccleston, was announced as the Ninth Doctor after a long lay-off, I decided to throw myself into this new but oddly familiar fan experience.

More from this author

Requiem for a cig

By Julie Burchill

I was very lucky to get back onboard when I did; this was the brilliant pairing of Eccleston and Billie Piper as his companion Rose Tyler, an unconsummated love story to rival Lost In Translation. It was here also that I became a fan of the writer Russell T Davies, going back to seek out his earlier body of work. But when Eccleston left after just one season and was replaced by the ineffably irritating David Tennant — all mugging and shrugging, with a Cockney accent that made Dick van Dyke look like Ray Winston — I lost interest. When my husband watched it, I’d go into my bedroom and play CDs loudly.

So when it was announced that RTD was returning to Dr Who in 2021 after several years of plummeting ratings, I didn’t even know he’d left in 2010. The fans were jubilant, as he was still revered for the way he’d brought the show back to life in 2005 and made it a surprise smash hit; the general feeling was that each subsequent change of show-runner had watered down that winning formula a little more, and the most recent incumbent (Chris Chibnall) had brought it to the brink of cancellation with atrocious scripts, an unlikeable lead (Jodie Whittaker) and an insufferably preachy tone that had a lot to do with the internet’s idea of social justice and almost nothing to do with monsters. The “Doctor Woo” jibe had been well earned. Of course we all knew RTD was a raging Leftie, but we also knew (or at least believed) he was no fool. This was going to be Doctor Who’s last chance — surely he’d have the sense to rein in the wokery a bit, bring back the half-decent jokes and reverse or at least ignore Chibnall’s disastrous Timeless Child storyline, which had posited that the First Doctor was not, in fact, William Hartnell but a little black girl? And we had every reason to feel encouraged by an interview that had recently appeared in the Telegraph with the headline “RUSSELL T DAVIES LAMBASTS DIVERSITY FIXATION OF ‘RUBBISH’ NEW TV WRITERS”. Go get ’em, Russell!

Suggested reading

JK Rowling mansplained

By Sarah Ditum

To say that what happened next was disappointing would be like saying that Daleks don’t make the best bartenders. RTD’s first comeback episode began by introducing us to a transgender youngster who wasted no time in telling off the Doctor for assuming a monster’s pronouns; that pretty much set the tone for the two (mercifully short) series that followed, in which Ncuti Gatwa gave us his Doctor as a prancing ninny who’d burst into tears at the drop of a fancy hat. But this incessant woo was actually the least of the revamped show’s problems. Davies had always been better at dialog than plot, but whatever storytelling skills he’d once had seemed to have deserted him: series-spanning story arcs led nowhere, or to the tritest conclusions, and it soon became apparent that he still knew how to start a story but had totes forgotten how to end one. Even the humor was labored and often weirdly childish, or else weirdly bitter.

When people inevitably started to complain, he hit back, saying they just had to accept that the show wasn’t for them any more. But it didn’t really seem to be for anyone else either, as the ratings continued to plummet; almost every episode in the second series got lower ratings than the one before and so became, for one week only, the lowest-rated episode ever. And then it just stopped, seemingly halfway through a story that made absolutely no sense, and Ncuti was off, amid rumors of backstage bust-ups, to be fleetingly replaced by Billie Piper, for reasons that almost certainly don’t exist yet and probably never will.

Now Davies is back: not only with Tip Toe, a miniseries about two next-door neighbors (Alan Cumming as a gay bar owner, David Morrissey as a straight electrician), but also with a strange new beef that no one saw coming. It was set off when, talking to the Guardian, Davies said of including a sympathetic gender-realist female character: “I wanted all sorts of voices in there. I’ve got friends who are gender-critical. It’s only online you end up screaming and shouting and being attacked by them. In real life, you have a chat, and we all kind of sigh and put up with each other. That’s how the world works.”

Having friends who think differently from one? How very dare T! Cue India Willoughby piling in on him for speaking to people who don’t think exactly the same as he does, because “tolerating the intolerant is unacceptable”. Some of the snarkiest reactions could be found on Mumsnet, where one user observed that “no doubt he’ll make a statement soon suggesting he was ‘misquoted/taken out of context’ and will swear fealty to the Purity Police”.

The Purity Police are the merciless overseers of the Purity Spirals, and that’s just what Davies has got himself into with Willoughby. In the past, a PS was known as “infighting”, which has always been so much worse on the Left, where politics takes the role of religion. Purity Spirals are so out-there cray-cray that one of the most famous centered on an Instagram knitting circle run by a gay man who became the victim of a race-row pile-on after he attempted to recruit more people of color by using the hashtag Diversknitty; he was accused of white supremacy and ended up in hospital on suicide watch. A sophisticate once told me that if you sit at a pavement cafe on the Via Veneto long enough, you will see everyone you know. It was probably an exaggeration — but I do think it true that if you stay on X long enough, you will have a bust-up with India Willoughby.

Davies has not deigned to answer Willoughby since the initial invitation to a ruck, so I’m hoping that Dr Whobris (as I have dubbed him) will stand firm and not be bullied into submission by the T he seems so determined to add to the LGB — though, of course, the bad part of me would love to see a good old online barney. Whatever, I think we can safely say that Tip Toe is not the only RTD show in town now that his comeback has commenced: I’ll be keenly observing both.

This strange plan — with a soupçon of science fiction about it, due to the odd device of the cut-off point, achieved by raising the legal smoking age by one year, every year — is a minor reminder that Rishi Sunak was ever prime minister. Our Glorious Leader Keir Starmer seems to have been with us for so long now — like a kind of political psoriasis — that it seems oddly time-warping to recall that it was only two years ago that the “loveless landslide” happened, making lady columnists feel “fruity” and their male counterparts deeply relieved that “the adults” were “back in the room”.

But before him, there was that nice Mr Sunak, who once admitted at the age of 21, in a 2001 television program called Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl, that he had no working-class friends: “I have friends who are aristocrats, I have friends who are upper-class, I have friends who are working-class…well, not working-class.” Though it’s cringey and shallow (would he dare to have transposed his bubble so openly from class to race?), one might applaud Sunak for simply speaking the truth; the classes are as savagely divided as they were in D.H. Lawrence’s day, probably more so due to the end of the grammar schools. Still, the patronizing paternalism of the smoking Bill, the lack of regard for personal freedom and the perception of the uni-party as a bunch of busybodies who always know better than you what’s best for you, makes it clear for the nth time why we are looking at a landscape in which Reform could replace the Conservatives as the opposition.

Not since Churchill’s cigar has a smoking politician been so identified by his habit as Nigel Farage, who is believed to be a 20-a-day man, even when in the I’m A Celebrity jungle. His man-of-the-people shtick — despite his expensive education and considerable wealth — has been established by the image of him at ease with a pint in one hand and a fag in the other; the pull of hedonism is a great leveler. He called Sunak’s plan “pious grandstanding”; last year, during the Tobacco and Vapes Bill’s report stage, he made a brilliant speech in the Commons: “I have to say, I find the tone of moral superiority in the chamber this afternoon almost unbearable… You clearly believe you are better human beings than those outside of here who choose to pursue activities that you perhaps would not. Well, it’s a bit of a shock, I suppose, to some of you, but there are some of us that like a smoke. We even go for a few pints at the pub. We have a punt on the horses. I even attempt to have the odd doughnut… Because we want to have fun. We want to make our own minds up. You can educate. You can tell us. You can give us the facts. But the idea that this place should make those decisions for other people shows me that the spirit of Oliver Cromwell is alive and well.”

Farage may be pushing it a bit when he heralds smokers as the “heroes of the nation” due to the huge taxes they contribute now that a packet of fags is pushing 20 quid. But he has a point: over 80% of the cost of a packet is tax, meaning that tobacco duty and VAT on smokeables bung the Exchequer around £8 billion a year whereas treating smoking-related illnesses is thought to cost the NHS around £2 billion. Then there’s the brisk “Net Saver” argument, which posits that as smokers often die younger, they save a vast amount of public money which might be spent on we oldsters, including our pensions and care homes.

Farage has it right when he leans into the pub as an important liberty bellwether. It’s telling to compare the delighted reaction of drinkers when Farage walks into a pub with the loathing felt towards Labour politicians, which became so extreme last winter that 250 pubs banned them. 

Looking back, the indoor smoking ban of 2007, under the Blair/Brown government, was the start of the current existential trouble which pubs find themselves in: one a day closes permanently now. That the government finally understands that it has pushed the hospitality industry too far was indicated by the fact that they pulled back from the proposed ban on smoking in pub gardens in 2024 — but it’s too late now. It’s poignant to recall that the name “public house” came about at a time when many actual houses where the poor lived were barren; the pubs ensured that the working classes had somewhere warm and welcoming to go to. Now that homes once more risk being dark and cold when the summer’s gone, many people will have to walk further to find a friendly light.

Does prohibition ever work? The tobacco black market is already huge. Christopher Snowdon, an economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said of Sunak’s strange legacy: “You’re going to have a fairly large, informal market of smokers who are old enough to buy cigarettes selling cigarettes to people who are not old enough. The problem with prohibition isn’t that it doesn’t have any effect whatsoever on consumption — the problem with prohibition is it leads to massive black markets and a lot of tax revenues gone.” So in its crazed compulsion to control the personal behavior of its citizens, the government will make itself far poorer — but bossiness is its own reward, if you’re that way inclined. 

Already, plenty of vaping shops sell contraband foreign fags on the cheap. The one nearest me sells “illicit whites”, literally from under the counter; manufactured in the UAE and China, they are around half the price of legal smokes. They taste like they’ve been produced by the government to put people off smoking, but they sell like hotcakes. They even have the mandatory gory health-warning pics on them, to make them look legal. Surely the kids will end up buying these — or else take up vaping. A primary school teacher I know says it’s not unusual for nine-year-olds to be enthusiastic and habitual vapers. It sounds like vapes have caused more problems than they’ve solved.

Why doesn’t the government treat the alcohol industry with similar ruthlessness? More than 10,000 people a year in the UK die from alcohol-specific causes. Alcohol abuse costs the NHS £4.9 billion, enough to pay the salaries of almost half the nurses in England; it costs the state £27 billion through everything from lost productivity to violent crime. So why not put photographs of beaten-up women on cans of strong beer? Or mangled cars on premium spirits? No one ever took a life because they had one too many fags.

I realize that I’m not a typical smoker. A pack will last me a week — and that’s shared with my husband. It would never occur to me to get the gaspers out at home; I only ever fancy one after a nice lunch out. I daresay I’m ignoring the science. But there are odd glitches in the modern mentality which insists that smoking is a social evil beyond all others. The Green Party plans to legalize crack cocaine while agreeing with the paternalistic attitude of the mainstream parties towards phasing out smoking. Last week, a report was released suggesting counterintuitively that young non-smokers who eat lots of fruit and vegetables may be more likely to develop lung cancer. “Have your 5 a day — and pass away!” was a public health message we never predicted. In 2023, the World Health Organization claimed that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day; yes, smoking can kill, but the urge to make friends over a cheeky fag in the freezing cold is a life-enhancing one.

Maybe I’m swayed by my own peculiar olfactory tastes. One of the dumbest lines about smoking — so dumb that anyone who utters it immediately identifies themselves as a half-wit — is “It would be like kissing an ashtray!” Personally, I find the scent of fresh smoking attractive, like fresh sweat, though of course nothing is nice when it’s stale. Many perfumes use tobacco as a “note” —Tom Ford’s Tobacco Vanille is particularly lush. 

My first remembered smell is that of my father, who had smoked 30 un-tipped Woodbines a day since he was a kid. He died of mesothelioma, which he contracted as a teenage boy working on the building of one of the proliferation of NHS hospitals after the war; of damage caused by tobacco, there was no trace. As with so many health-related issues, so much of it really is the — excuse the pun — luck of the draw.

How times change. In recent years, Dubai has become a kind of promised land for the young and the restless, the sleazy and the shady and international criminals evading justice — and the most amusing cohort, those who believe Britain is going to the dogs by importing too many Muslims and so go to live in a Muslim country where apostasy is a crime, gender apartheid is practiced and the law punishes homosexuality with anything from fines to floggings to a sizable jail sentence.

Mind you, it’s hardly Liberty Hall for heterosexuals, either. Even married couples who are overcome with lust to the point of hugging in public may expect a stern warning while thousands are cautioned by police on the beaches each year for showing affection. The most shocking case happened when in 2024 a London boy, Marcus Fakana, was sent to jail for having a holiday romance with a female fellow teenager, also on holiday from England with her parents. He spent around a year in prison before being freed due to a “royal pardon” from Dubai’s ruler — Dubai being one of seven hereditary emirates within the United Arab Emirates, each one of them an absolute monarchy.

More from this author

The hidden virtue of reality TV

By Julie Burchill

There’s an inherent tension in young British men and women, famous around the globe for their intoxicated displays of lust under the foreign sun, flocking to a place with such savagely stuffy sexual standards, and where prohibitions on revealing “too much” flesh is a matter for the law. There’s a vital get-out clause, though; these rules don’t apply to Westerners in waterparks, beaches, clubs and bars, which are pretty much the only places Westerners in Dubai frequent. Other foreigners in Dubai, especially the non-white ones, aren’t so privileged. Major construction in Dubai only started in the Nineties; now it is home to one of the world’s densest skylines, including the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. All this has been built in record time by migrant workers — generally from South and South East Asia, particularly India and Nepal — who have spent 12-hour shifts sacrificing themselves to the monster hotels which house Western tourists. The documentary Slaves of Dubai presents a grim picture of a side of the city that most visitors choose not to see.

Thousands of these workers die every year; some estimates have it as high as 10,000 deaths across the Gulf region, with more than half recorded as “cardiac arrest”. As most of these men are young, this seems unlikely to have occurred “naturally”. It seems far more likely that falling from great heights, electrocution, heat exhaustion and generally hazardous working conditions are to blame.

Dubai is a place in which an Arab and European overclass are waited on hand and foot by an Asian servant class. In an amusingly mis-timed piece in this week’s Heat magazine — “LIVING THE DUBAI DREAM” — the reality TV personality Luisa Zissman named a better quality of life as her reason for moving there, summed up by the fact that she was able to get a pair of false eyelashes delivered in 11 minutes on New Years Eve; I’d take a punt that her speedy courier was neither European nor Arab. But then, this modern slavery practiced in places like Dubai seems not to trouble the westerners who flock to the Gulf in search of luxury goods and Instagram likes. What was my excuse for going there, then? Well, we didn’t have the internet back then; no one has that excuse these days. Everyone knows exactly where they’re going and how it got there.

Founded in the early 18th century as a fishing settlement, Dubai became a trade hub in the early 20th century before oil discoveries made it rich in the Sixties and Seventies. These discoveries were relatively minor however; oil revenue makes up less than 2% of its GDP, hence the diversification into real estate and tourism. The emirate is now the seventh most-visited city in the world and its airport is the world’s busiest in the world. Some 92% of the population are expatriates; a lot of these are British, and a good proportion of them are young Britons, often social media influencers. For unformed souls whose fragile sense of self requires ceaseless reassurance from the labels in their clothes, Dubai is perfect. It’s cheaper: Move International recently came up with the figure of 37% cheaper than London, with gasoline, rent, and public transport costing far less. There is, of course, zero income tax. It’s always hot — worship of the sun has become almost a religion to youngsters. Every car is a limousine, every carpet is red and everything is covered in so much gilt that it makes Versailles look like Bauhaus.

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way some of those stuck there are carrying on now. “I’m trapped and under attack in Dubai — while back home in Chichester my daughters are furious, the labradoodles are sick and, worst of all, I left my Mounjaro pen in the fridge,” wrote the journalist Shona Sibary in the Daily Mail. But though holidaymakers want to come home, the expats seem disinclined to leave. Somewhat surreally, they repeatedly refer to how much “safer” they feel even in a war zone than in Sadiq Khan’s London. They often mention their trust in the Dubai authorities — the same authorities who routinely remove brown-skinned workers’ passports, of course. I disliked it very much, finding it both garish and dreary at the same time — quite an achievement — and while I’m all for a bit of artifice, I do remember being nonplussed when I was on one of the “best” beaches, idly digging into the sand, only to find concrete a few inches below, probably because land-reclamation has added more than 190 miles of artificial coastline.

Several theories have been proposed about the origin of the word Dubai. One is that it comes from the same root as the Arabic word for “money”; and where there’s brass, there’s muck. Most Brits migrate there in order not to pay tax, as much as for “a better way of life for families” as several showbiz shills say — which again, seems peculiar, given how normalized sexual exploitation is in Dubai (as the eye-popping “Dubai porta-potty party” rumors attest). To thrive amid this seediness requires a kind of warped innocence.

But then, Dubai abounds in these contradictions. It is one of the strangest places in the world; the meeting zone of Medievalism and modernity. “The Venice of the Gulf” is one of the nicknames it aspires to — but we forget that Venice wasn’t historically just a place with lots of water and pretty bridges, but rife with corruption and war-games.

Another hopeful sobriquet is “The City of the World” — which takes on a new meaning now. Nowhere in the world is safe from the coming storm, no matter how many human sacrifices have been made lining them with gold. The existential clash of civilizations can happen as easily on beaches, in the sunshine — much to the bafflement of the young studs and starlets, caught in a war-zone when all they sought was The Good Life.

But Dubai was always built on shifting sands — with cold, hard concrete just a few inches beneath.

For reasons of commerce, the punter is driven to disregard the fact that the shops will be closed for only one whole day, and is instead encouraged to feel that they are prepping for an imminent world war. This, combined with our current tendency to pathologize even the slightest mental pothole, means that magazines are running pieces with the headline “How to help your children manage their festive emotions”, while the rest of us hit the shops to the soundtrack of Mariah Carey in a wild panic. Kiddies have been eating too much chocolate, puking and crying at Christmas for as long as anyone can remember, but now it must be yet another bit of emotional housework on the part of harassed parents striving to make things “perfect”.

You’d think that with all this going on, listening to a cheery Christmas song might provide a moment of aural respite. After all, as far back as the fourth century, soothing early hymns such as “Jesus Refulsit Omnium” were associated with the celebration. But in Victorian times, secular festive songs which swerved the religious aspect in favor of the comfort and joy motif became more popular. And it was this idea of mindless scoffing and quaffing which has proved a devastatingly rich seam for Christmas popsters ever since; whenever I hear Slade’s 1973 “Merry Xmas Everybody”, I get a rush of gratitude that I was a teenager when such unifying proletarian jollity ruled. Noddy Holder, true to form, wrote the lyrics in one night at his mum’s house in Walsall after an evening out drinking in Wolverhampton; he has referred to the song as “a nice pension plan…it’s like having a hit record every year”, with the annual revenue coming in at around half a million pounds. He would later recall the lyrics as describing a distinctly “family-based”, “very working-class Christmas”, with the closing line “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun”, somewhat counterintuitively influenced by the power cuts which were a side-effect of the miners strike. This was the old optimistic way of thinking, the pull-up-your-socks, the there’ll-be-bluebirds-over-the-white-cliffs-of-Dover-tomorrow-just-you-wait-and-see mindset which we appear to have lost now that “Helping Your Children Manage Their Festive Emotions” is an actual thing.

More from this author

Save me from John Lewis Britain

By Julie Burchill

For despite Slade’s flagrant vulgarity, and the ceaseless leering at some imaginary dolly-bird which was Holder’s resting lech face, Christmas songs were still innocent then — wholesome, even. “Merry Xmas Everybody”, with the granny who maintains initially that “the old songs are the best” before being “up and rock-and-rolling with the rest”, was an heir of “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and its line “Everyone dancing merrily in the new, old-fashioned way!” In both, the generations, though initially hostile to each others’ cultural choices, eventually come together.

But since then, a corrupting rot has set in. And The X-Factor must shoulder much of the blame, given that, from 2005 to 2010, it seemed as if one of the great Christian festivals was being co-opted for the empire-building purposes of Simon Cowell. One didn’t have to be a big fan of Rage Against the Machine to feel brattishly pleased that “Killing In The Name” was 2009’s Christmas Number One after a public campaign to get it there — thus preventing Joe McElderry’s “The Climb” from reaching the summit. RATM even gave the profits from the single to Shelter, which made their record far more Christmassy than the X-Factor offering which simply laid some Christmas bells over the schmaltzy “my struggle” lyrics.

Another wretched commercial castration of the power of pop music was on hand to take over from The X-Factor; the John Lewis Christmas ad, which specialized in either taking good songs and wringing all the juice out of them with desiccated cover versions or playing the originals of great songs (this year Alison Limerick’s “Where Love Lives”) and thereby mugging one’s memories in the name of turning a Yuletide buck.

It’s censoriousness, though, which has had the most enervating effect on the Christmas record. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was condemned as a date-rape duet several years ago, while in 2020 the BBC announced that the audience for “Fairytale Of New York” would be segregated; unexpurgated on Radio 2, for the sassy old, and censored on Radio 1, for the sensitive young, leading me to believe that if rock and roll were invented these days, old people would be out there dancing to it and young people would be burning the records. This year, a live version of the track — often named the nation’s favorite, but never to reach Number One — has been released, prompting the BBC, in best Scrooge mode, to announce a ban on it across all playlists.

Suggested reading

What Taylor Swift owes Jilly Cooper

By Mary Harrington

Christmas makes us think of not just what we still have left (our loved ones, our sanity) but what we have lost (ditto). The best festive records inspire a wistful nostalgia, summoning our ghosts of Christmas — past and present. My most beloved Christmas music memory is of my mother, who would die in my arms a few years later, and my son Jack, now 10 years a suicide, cuddled up on the sofa at my parents’ home in Bristol, singing along to the Spice Girls “2 Become 1” on Top of the Pops. It should have been comical (the song is about sex, with a few lines dedicated to the importance of wearing a condom) but their voices blended so beautifully together, the old lady and the little boy, both of them so full of hope.

Now the Spice Girls are gone — the last pop group to unite the generations, and probably the only one apart from the Beatles — and so has the sainted George Michael, who died on Christmas Day 2016 of heart disease. His “Last Christmas” was last week’s Number One, and has been the Christmas chart-topper for the last two years, something it never achieved in his lifetime, and very likely prompted in some part by the public tenderness felt for him following posthumous revelations about his immense generosity.

He would have been happy, I feel, to have been toppled by Kylie. Now that the Queen is dead and a weak and divisive monarch is on the throne, it’s possible that Kylie is the nearest thing we have to one who can unite the nation — in every degree of fondness from casual affection to wild adulation. Over the years (she’s 57 now), we have seen her go from ingénue to grande dame with grace and skill — Sex Kitten turned Mother Courage; Show Pony turned Stoic. The Christmas Number One spot has been won by her at the merciful closing of a bad year — a spark of sequined light in the darkness. So with Kylie-shaped order restored, we may go about the allegedly dreadful slog of shopping, traveling and party planning with a spring in our step however briefly, before we once more resume our lives in a benighted nation where it is always winter and never Christmas.

As Gareth Roberts pointed out in his latest book, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had quite a temper tantrum over Israel. “Why is a television chef being consulted on these weighty matters?” Roberts writes. “We were never treated to Fanny Cradock’s thoughts on the Tet Offensive. Viewers would have been staggered if Dorothy Sleightholme had rested her whisk on the chopping block in the Farmhouse Kitchen to give us her two penneth on Soweto. Rustie Lee was not encouraged to volunteer her opinions on the Chernobyl disaster.”

Perhaps the most mainstream and surreal example of this is Carol Vorderman — who has gone from being Rear of the Year to Rosa Luxembourg. But you can see it everywhere: any moment now I expect to find out that Basil Brush has been canceled for inappropriate behavior towards Mr Derek, or vice versa — it was always hard to tell who was wagging whose tail.

The latest “casualty” of the culture wars — though to call it that is to lend it more dignity than it deserves; perhaps we should describe it as the brain-dead brouhaha of the Trash Telly Top Trumps — is the Eurovision Song Contest, from which a growing number of countries are withdrawing their “artistes”. (Though anyone who witnessed last year’s most vocal opponent of Israel, one “Bambi Thug”, might conclude that using the word “artiste” to describe her is about as accurate as calling the contents of a nappy an “artifact”.) The delegations of the unfriendly nations demanded a secret vote on Israel’s participation — for the inevitable reasons — which has sensibly been rejected, indicating that the Eurovision bigwigs are pleasingly determined to dig their heels in, perhaps in the light of how popular the Israeli entry proved with the public last year; ranked joint 14th by the national juries, but dominating the leaderboard due to the results of the online and phone votes. Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK were among the countries whose viewers awarded Israel the maximum 12 points. Once again, the voice of the people (don’t forget the mocked contest attracts a larger European television audience than anything apart from big sports matches) and the voice of the captured Establishment couldn’t have been more at odds.

More from this author

Nooky, nipples and The Forsytes

By Julie Burchill

Not content with creating the circumstances which led to a young woman, Eden Golan, being booed while singing a song about the Hamas pogrom, many of last year’s persecutors are back for a second go. Yuval Raphael, who will represent Israel next year, was actually a survivor of the 2023 attack, so one can imagine the usual self-righteous sadists having an especially fun time barracking her. So far, Spain, Ireland, Slovenia and the Netherlands have boycotted the contest; only Spain is one of the Eurovision’s Big Five countries along with France, Germany, Italy and the UK, so I can’t imagine the European Broadcasting Union’s (EBU) General Assembly getting their scanties in a bunch quite yet.

It’s interesting to examine the motivation of this decidedly un-fab four. Slovenia only has a few hundred Jews — but, regrettably, what with knowing what we know about the behavior of Eastern European countries during the Second World War, their joining in doesn’t exactly come as a shock. Since the war ended, the Netherlands have a record of stability and tolerance towards Jews, to the point that the Dutch Jewish population is growing as a result of migration, mainly from Israel; Jews born in Israel constitute about 20% of the Jews living in the Netherlands today. But the recent behavior in Amsterdam towards Maccabi Tel Aviv fans and the massive growth in Muslim immigration may well have changed the mood of the nation, as indeed it has in the UK, where having just under four million Muslims and only around 300,000 Jews residing here has very much made many politicians puppets of the larger demographic.

In the case of Spain and Ireland, though, it’s tempting to shrug, albeit sorrowfully. What did we expect? Spain, the home of the Inquisition, repeated Jewish expulsion and forced conversion, appears to be reverting to type. The same could be said of Ireland, which has taken to anti-Israel activity with a relish that won’t surprise anyone who remembers that Eamon de Valera’s Eire was “neutral” in the war between the Allies and the Axis.

Since the Gaza conflict, the phenomenon of “top-down” antisemitism — masquerading as anti-Zionism — has been noted as being more extreme in Ireland than in any other Western nation; far from being a “bottom-up” issue, this one is driven by the political and academic elite, who have far less excuse for behaving so. (The Irish public, don’t forget, awarded Israel 10 points in the public vote last year.) There are only between 2,000 and 3,000 Jews in the Republic of Ireland; one of them, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland said “I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know that I am just a Jew living in Ireland.”

When I was a girl, the politics of Eurovision were a bit of a chuckle, about ancient grudges; Turkey and Greece punishing each other over Cyprus, or us and the Germans being scrupulously polite to each other while awarding each other sod-all points — an act the French were always keen to get in on with their chicly clipped “Nul points!” Then it became about Brexit. The funniest thing about the Eurovision, for me, is that its whole purpose was to make us forget our petty differences and unite as one continent in The Joy of Song, but all it has ever really done is throw our differences into sharp relief and remind us of them — which I suppose could equally be said of the EU itself. But this was knockabout stuff compared with the real viciousness which, since the Hamas attack, has been aimed directly at the world’s only Jewish state. Where will the Light Entertainment Wars end? As the least switched-on people in media often work in this field, it seems likely that, like the Japanese soldier who refused to believe the war was over, they will keep on plugging away even though those at the top of the TV pyramid have realized that this parrot is dead and are seeking to ditch identity politics in favor of something more vote-catching. So I don’t know about you, but I’m on tenterhooks till I find out what Mr Blobby’s views on puberty blockers are.

I could imagine the post-prandial ad-men, smug and sweaty around their Fitzrovia lunch table, brainstorming ideas for the 2025 edition of what has become one of our most shameful festive rituals. The advert must never be “traditional” and certainly not religious — that would be seen as “Right-wing”. No, it must say something meaningful about Britain today. It must supplant our tenderest feelings towards our loved ones at a time of fraying nerves, political turmoil and financial stress with emotional warmth towards a department store. It must pretend to care.

And so, here it is, a surly teenage lad buying his Centrist Dad a vinyl copy of that dance classic Where Love Lives — causing Centrist Dad to flashback to happier times and then re-connect with his lad at the end. Boys have feelings too! Men can cry! Males must hug or die! A pinch of Adolescence; a generous measure of Nineties dance nostalgia; et voila! That will get the old ravers at the school gates wetting themselves in sheer molten awe. Pass the coke.

You can’t say it isn’t effective. Within minutes of the advert’s release on Tuesday, the nation’s WhatsApp groups were awash with bawling adults barely able to contain themselves at the level of emotion this crass approximation of intergenerational love evoked in them.

It wasn’t always this bad. John Lewis’s inaugural Christmas ad in 2007 was directed by Michael “The Greatest Showman” Gracey and featured the Morning Serenade from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. There was a marked shift, however, by 2010 with “A Tribute to Givers” (2010), the schmaltz soundtracked by Ellie Goulding wimping the hell out of Elton John’s “Your Song”. The following year we were treated to “The Long Wait”, in which an apparently acquisitive kiddy (twist: he can’t wait to “gift” his parents) counts down the “sleeps” to Crimbo to the sound of a Smiths song sung by a pensive sloth. At this point, the hitherto rather old-fashioned John Lewis Partnership, founded in 1864, found itself becoming something like a phenomenon, as much a part of the build-up to Christmas as Mariah Carey and pavement pizzas outside every pub.

More from this author

Nooky, nipples and The Forsytes

By Julie Burchill

But it’s their lack of healthy vulgarity that makes these ads so loathsome. They’re “wistful”, one of my least favorite looks, generally flavored by airheads who want to seem deep but are probably thinking about what kind of sprinkles to have on their latte. Naturally, as with most cynics, the admen behind the wistfulness have a sentimental streak a mile wide, hence the repeated trope of children turning up trumps when we thought they might be little swine. And as is often the case with sentimentality, the adverts hide a multitude of sins.

In “The Unexpected Guest” (2021), a black child meets a white female alien in a forest (seeming to suggest that the only good white person is one from another planet) and instructs her in the ways of Christmas. It’s enough to make a cat laugh, especially as this was also the year the company was fined for paying workers below the minimum wage. (I bet they didn’t pay the advertising agency below the minimum wage; I bet they paid them a fortune.)

John Lewis, of course, rather creepily insists on calling its workers Partners — which always sounded very like the soft-soap before the shafting. Only last year, the company announced a swingeing cut to its workforce — up to 11,000 jobs out of 76,000 workers — having announced its second full-year loss in 2023 (a whopping £234 million). Bonuses were canceled and redundancy packages crushed from two weeks of pay per year to one. Just as creepily, it has told the BBC it “has a plan to return to profit… that sadly means reducing the number of Partners we need in our business.”

The commercials themselves are less advertising than branding — designed to make us associate the shop with the sort of warm, fuzzy feelings that we’d normally associate with Christmas itself. But there’s a cautionary tale to be told here. This isn’t the first time a TV commercial became an end in itself, rather than a means of boosting profits.

Back in the Seventies, a knockabout series of TV ads for Cinzano vermouth, featuring Leonard Rossiter finding various ways to tip his tipple over Joan Collins’s tits, became something of a national obsession. However, the principal beneficiary turned out not to be Cinzano but the already market-leading brand Martini. As one industry source told Marketing Week: “Everyone remembers that ad but it was so engrossing that people forgot it was for Cinzano and went out and bought Martini.” One can imagine the same thing happening with the John Lewis ads. Can’t believe Christmas is here again! Better go on Amazon and see what’s on offer.

The Lewis commercials, though, have long been high on their own supply — vanity projects supreme. Like Paddington, whom everyone in their right mind must surely want to throttle by now, they are the soundtrack to what Gareth Roberts calls “the Tyranny Of Twee”. They are up there with the Book of Nom and holibobs and constant cries of “Stay hydrated!”

Suggested Reading

How Bill Bryson hoodwinked England

By Fred Sculthorp

But behind the bluster, most people in advertising really do feel that they have sold out — and with good reason. (“By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing — kill yourself. No. Seriously. Go home and kill yourself. You are Satan’s little helpers” — Bill Hicks). Thus they seek to make the songs which galvanized them in their youth as desiccated and decaffeinated as they themselves now are. The sound of The Human League and Morrissey, the Beatles and Oasis, are too full of the dreams and yearning of youth. They must be mulched down into easily digested canned-nourishment meal-replacements so as not to disturb the digestion of Johnny Marketeer.

This year, however, John Lewis has gone the other way — and given me yet another thing to hate about them — by using the original version of “Where Love Lives”, a song I love (though, true to form, they pollute it with a new dirge-version by Labrinth at the end). This banger brings back such happy memories of being newly moved to Brighton and falling in love with my husband. Now my memories have been mugged by Saatchi & Saatchi, as Centrist Dad grinds that happiness into cringe on the dance floor.

Too bad. We all live in John Lewis Britain now. We’ve all drunk the consumerist Kool-Aid and become a nation of sentimental saps who consider a commercial (the clue is in the name) to be a piece of high art. So effectively has commerce infiltrated our homes, our families, our hearts and minds, we can no longer tell the difference.

John Lewis: never knowingly underestimating the presumed gullibility of the British public. Except that we aren’t so gullible anymore. The break-down of conventional politics, and the utter lack of trust in the establishment, may well see the end of these loathsome, lazy indulgences which seek to pick our pockets even as they pat our heads. This Yule, let that be our Christmas wish, to misquote Yeats, that the Centrist Dads will not hold. Let the 2025 John Lewis advert be their swansong.

In the light of the new Channel 5 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels, which starts tonight, it’s interesting to recall this TV landmark. It’s become part of pop-culture myth that contrary to what you’d expect, male viewers generally sympathized with Irene (probably because they fancied the actress Nyree Dawn Porter and felt protective of her) and women tended to be on the side of Soames (because Irene was considered a bit of a cow who went on to steal her best friend’s boyfriend and then, when he died, run off with his cousin). Rape in marriage wouldn’t become a criminal offense in England until 1991, and Irene’s assault at the hands of her husband was portrayed as something unfortunate but probably not a deal-breaker, especially as she had at least partly married him for his money. Even though this is obviously a bad and ridiculous thing, I do rather miss the days when everything that happened in television drama wasn’t necessarily a prompt for the next session of PMQs. I don’t think I could bear Stella Creasy’s snobbish little face as she informed us smugly that gammons, flag-shaggers and Brexit voters generally were far more likely on average to rape their wives than any other sort of man currently resident in these isles.

Three main things have happened to period drama since then: smut, diversity and rose-colored glasses. The first we can mostly blame on screenwriter Andrew Davies, who couldn’t see a bustle without wanting to do something beastly to it. It’s a whopping three decades now since Elizabeth Bennett got an eyeful of a sopping Mr. Darcy; apparently Davies was persuaded to sex-up Pride and Prejudice by “a former student” who suggested he make it “really sexy” — try telling that to the judge these days! His romp became a TV phenomenon, attracting millions of viewers here and in the USA, winning two BAFTAs and an Emmy even though it had taken “years of perseverance and persuasion to get it on our screens” as apparently costume dramas had “gone quite out of fashion”. Sadly this enlightened state of affairs did not last. Davies was given carte blanche to get his grubby mitts all over a prurient parade of classic novels, even going so far as to jump into Austen’s grave for a quick necro-fumble when he inserted the dirty deed into her last unfinished novel Sanditon for a 2019 TV outing. A spry 82-years old at the time, Davies was at least admirably frank about his wicked ways: “I aim to please myself when writing these things… I write something that I would like to watch and I suppose the sexing it up thing comes in fairly naturally,” he said at a preview screening “If it’s not there I feel, well, that’s a shame — let’s put some in. I like to write it and I like to watch it.”

In 2009, Davies’ adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels were scrapped by the BBC in a bid to move away from “bonnet dramas”, which they have obviously since thought better of, as The Forsytes features more bonnets than your nearest car park. Maybe they just didn’t have enough nooky and nipples in them? Added smut has attracted an even larger proportion of daft women to period drama. What can seem common in contemporary clothing can always be classy if a few strategic ruffles are added; I doubt if men appreciating the winner of a wet T-shirt contest would keep cropping up in compilations of TV family favorites.

Then there’s diversity. At a time when we’re rightfully aware that black people in white societies had a rotten time in past centuries, it’s odd that they’re to be seen in Bridgerton and the like swanning around with enough jewels and titles to make your average member of the Almanach de Gotha emerald-green with envy. Like TV adverts featuring beautiful multi-racial couples sharing a latte and a laugh in kitchens bigger than the average flat, there’s a weird cake-consumed-and-also-kept thing going on here.

This leads us to the rose-colored-glasses element inherent in period drama, which as a woman of working-class origin (I’m putting my self-righteous hat briefly on here) I find particularly galling. Because I just know that most of the women who watch these things — and come on, I’ve never met a man who voluntarily watches them alone — see themselves as the lady of the house, not the poor, exploited servant girl which they overwhelmingly would be. Downton Abbey in particular romanticized a time when working-class servant girls were little more than slaves, living under constant threat of sexual exploitation. As a youngster in the Seventies, I liked the wildly popular Upstairs, Downstairs (tellingly co-created by two actresses of working-class origin, Jean Marsh, who also starred as Rose, and Eileen Atkins) precisely because escaping the servant’s hall was seen as the ambition of any sane and spirited girl, with only those thoroughly gelded by the class system showing any loyalty to their aristocratic employers.

Suggested Reading

Margaret Thatcher’s erotic power

By Rowan Pelling

As for the new version of The Forsytes, the deathly word “re-imagining” has already cropped up in puff pieces, as has the drearily predictable promise of “Strong Women”; please, if a woman is described this way, I want to see her pull a truck along with her teeth, like on The World’s Strongest Man. I wonder if a line of Irene’s I remember from the original series will make it through, Female Friendship being such a televisual fetish these days. When she is caught out by her young protégé June having an affair with June’s fiancé, the younger girl yells something like “But I thought you were my friend!”, to which Irene retorts along the lines of “A woman of the world doesn’t have friends — she has lovers, and acquaintances”. I can’t see that flying with the sisters-over-misters ethos of today. One of the producers, Damien Timmer, has po-facedly said that “we wanted to take a magnifying glass to this extremely wealthy family who are the 1%”, while writer Debbie Horsfield has tutted “We were clear from the word go that we weren’t going to do a straight adaptation of these male-centric novels”. She previously adapted Poldark, which made me consider that it’s a jolly good job that men are accommodating enough to write these big, sprawling, male-centric sagas that we ladies can then tinker with, providing that essential woman’s touch, fluffing up the contemporary cushions on these huge slabs of original material.

I sound irascible, but to be fair, I am impatient with most portrayals of women on television these days, with their seemingly contradictory message that we’re both Poor Things and that We Can Do Anything — make your mind up! But even more, I miss the days when there wasn’t a lecture, or a scolding of some kind, wrapped up inside every last TV drama, like a very un-fun Kinder Surprise. It’s been a trying year, and I don’t think that I could face the sight/sound of Keir Starmer standing up in the House of Commons and advising us to watch this new documentary series (as he famously mis-genred the TV series Adolescence), The Forsytes, about how lucky we are to live in a time when Ordinary Working Families don’t have to act as a servant class to the rich, fetching and carrying for them for a pittance. Because we import people to do that for us now — and that’s progress.

Do they still? Next month’s belated 40th anniversary reissue of ABC’s legendary debut will be marked with — deep breath — the album performed live at Hammersmith Odeon, numerous remixes, a disc featuring Mantrap, the group’s 55-minute espionage thriller directed by Julien Temple, and an essay by lead singer Martin Fry. For once, the hoo-ha seems reasonable. Entering the album chart at number one, the record featured three classic top 10 singles and remained on the charts for 50 weeks.

Yet for all the Lexicon‘s success, it’s hard not to conclude that the love song has since become the exception rather than the rule. Was it a case of the singer, not the song? Did Fry’s voice give a depth to his creations that might otherwise not have been there? Hardly: the song-cycle was so spectacular that its success happened despite, rather than because, of the magic pipes of the warbler. Fry was a profoundly humdrum vocalist, a phenomena that affected many of the biggest bands of the time, including Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, whose Simon Le Bon and Tony Hadley both often sounded as though they had a crucial body part trapped in a door.

The death of the love song is often attributed to that old, shag-shy stalwart: the end of innocence. When sex got slammed on the table, love, and all the yearning metaphors that fuelled the great love songs, went out through the window. But love wasn’t murdered by sex; after all, Mick Jagger and David Bowie were both slappers who wrote many great love songs. I’d also wager that Adele and Ed Sheeran have put it about a lot less than most people, definitely less than most pop stars, but their love songs are the aural equivalent of that tinned gunk designed to nourish invalids. Like great political leaders, then, great love songs can’t be conjured up by monogamy or banished by promiscuity. Neither can “commercialism” be blamed, as if the great love songs were written in some Arcadian glade. On the contrary, many came from songwriting industrial complexes, from Tin Pan Alley to the Brill Building.

Suggested reading

The perversion of lesbian envy

By Julie Burchill

Instead, much of the blame can be placed on the atomisation of society. Great songs — love, and otherwise — require an oceanic element, a single story that millions can relate to. When I was a teenager, we would congregate in the cloakrooms on a Tuesday lunchtime, literally holding our breath until we found out where our favourite single was in the new Radio 1 top 20. I remember my friend Carol bursting into tears when “The Jean Genie” failed to reach the top spot and having to go home as she couldn’t sufficiently pull herself together to face an afternoon in double physics. Then came Thursday’s Top of the Pops, when you could moon over the latest teen idols singing their love songs, just for you — and, if you were lucky, witness the outrage of your dad as David Bowie cracked on with his guitarist.

It’s not just songs, though; artistic representations of love have generally deteriorated. Is it likely that we’ll ever see a film such as Casablanca or read a book such as The End of the Affair again? Now, even romcoms have been ditched for superhero franchises, while Sally Rooney writes novels which might generically be called “Janet and John Get Naked and Say Stuff about the Pointlessness of Existence”. Love, though always as mysterious as a mermaid, was once as easy to find as chips — but with the endless chatter and clatter of online life, how will we ever stop our trivial amusements long enough to hear the song of the siren? Stop that racket, I’m trying to watch Love Island!

Suggested reading

Pop can't escape the Eighties

By Dorian Lynskey

Of course, none of this is helped by the fact that, thanks to social media and therapy culture, we talk about our emotions so much that there’s nothing left for love songs. Consider this lyric from last year, in Cat Burn’s “Ghosting”:

“I always come first, prioritise myself
‘Cause I could lose it all
And fall down a deep hole
I gotta watch my mental health
So I recharge alone
Don’t take it personal
I’m just an introvert
So don’t stress, I’ll be fine
I just need some time.”

This may well be an excellent life lesson — but as a love song, it sucks. And not in a good way.

Though I know what I like when it comes to love songs — “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” by The Beach Boys, “Baby It’s You” by The Shirelles, “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure — others will disagree. So I asked the composer Robin Watt, whose modern showtunes have been compared to those of the American Songbook canon, what he thought the problem is. “Irving Berlin, probably the most successful composer in history, famously played piano with one finger,” he told me. “A lack of musicianship isn’t a bar to composing great love songs. Berlin often broke the rules by having unusual lengths for each section or bunging in an extra bridge. In total contrast, these kids today can’t seem to break out of this dreadful musical rut. The effect is one of permanent suspension in a state of despair, whereas once a melody was about creating and resolving tension. Even uptempo stuff today still has this thread of self-regarding woe to it. The solution would be that composers stop taking themselves so seriously — but, unfortunately, that won’t happen as long as they have all these ‘issues’.”

ABC’s subsequent decline after the splendour of their debut is a microcosm of what has happened to the love song generally over the past four decades. Beauty Stab, their 1983 follow-up, was not just an example of Second Album Syndrome, but a veritable self-immolation; Simon Reynolds called it “one of the great career-sabotage LPs of pop”. Though ABC has staggered on in various incarnations ever since, it quickly went a bit Light Entertainment. In 2005, Fry toured with Tony Hadley, a missed opportunity which, if they’d only included Simon Le Bon, might have been a crooning equivalent of the Three Tenors — the Three Tenners, perhaps, as that’s the absolute most you’d pay to see them.

Suggested reading

Kylie Minogue's glorious artifice

By Kathleen Stock

Haunted by his Citizen Kane, Fry announced in 2015 that his new album would be called The Lexicon of a Lost Ideal, “a take on The Lexicon of Love, but all these years on. I’m a man in my fifties now with a wealth of experience. It’s about how you grow older but you make the same mistakes over and over and over again.” When it was released the following spring, imaginatively re-titled The Lexicon of Love II, it entered the UK album charts at number five, ABC’s highest ranking since the original. It wasn’t a bad record — but there’s a world of difference between not bad and perfection.

Will the love song ever get its mojo back? I really do hope so, even though I personally have heard all the great love songs I can handle. Because only then can we once more go serenely to our favourite pizza parlours without hearing the great love songs of the 20th century slowed down and droned to death by sad young people who know there’s something missing from their own repertoire, but don’t have the lexicon — of love — to put it right.

But enough of my mash note. Dr Stock is such a fascinating figure because she represents everything about being a lesbian that men — no matter how much they stamp their massive feet in their stripper heels — can never possess. It’s nothing to do with pornography and lipstick, the twin pillars of this strange new faith; she highlights the profound emptiness of their performative fantasy of femininity.

Where once society was defined by Penis Envy, Lesbian Envy is today’s driving force. So much performative thespian-lesbianism has taken place in popular culture that you’d think every woman was at it, but if we regard the history of lesbianism, most of it has gone on in secret.

Many lesbians point out that, historically, there has been little overlap between the problems and pleasures of lesbians and homosexual men. Men are reviled for it in the Scriptures and have had laws passed against them, while women are more likely to simply be ignored, culminating in Queen’s Victoria’s refusal to believe that lesbianism existed. Yet, at the same time, homosexuals had great power in the Greek and Roman empires, while lesbians certainly didn’t. While Oscar Wilde could be a tragic martyr to The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, lesbianism has long been easy to reduce to titillation and entertainment. If you admire the female form, the onanist logic goes, why not admire it times-two? And, unlike with straight porn, there won’t be any well-hung male hanging around to make you feel bad about yourself.

This can lead a certain type of man to feel that, even for them, lesbianism can be a little something on the side, even something which adds to their own appeal. In the Nineties, I had an idea for a Bateman-style cartoon that portrayed a man being shunned by his contemporaries: The Man Whose Wife Wouldn’t Do Girl-On-Girl. It was around this time, during my second marriage, when I fell for a woman and my second husband gave me “permission” to see her, even doing a humorous routine for his friends: “Lesbians make such fascinating wives!” He wasn’t laughing when I left him for her, whereupon I uttered the classic line to the Evening Standard gossip column: “Miss Raven and I are not lesbians — we are simply in love.”

I wasn’t being super-straight or shy in saying this. Rather, I was aware that being the capricious creature I am, I didn’t feel morally worthy of bearing a name which brave women had suffered for, simply because I was following a whim which I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be indulging in for long. (Sure enough, I soon ran off with her brother.) Today, by contrast, straight people stampede to call themselves queer, so prevalent is the idea that “heterosexual equals bad” and “homosexual equals good”. There are so many young women holding up their baby boys on social media and pronouncing them “Gay!” that I’ve often thought that if a certain sort of young woman could be guaranteed to have a gay baby, the moribund birthrate of the West would shoot up.

But lesbianism has been ditched by those with the most claim to it and who could be most inspired by its history — a dirty word among young girls who prefer to be acceptably queer or trans. As the young American pop and reality TV star JoJo Siwa said last year: “I don’t like the word [lesbian] itself. It’s just like a lot. At the end of the day, that’s what I am… but it’s like the word moist. It’s just like… ugh!”

Meanwhile, contemporary gender activists do their very best to make lesbianism sound not “sexy fun”, as it was from Tallulah to Tatu, but just another workaday drudgery of dealing with the worst sort of pervy, grope men. As no less than John Hopkins University this month noted in its online glossary of LGTBQ terms, a “lesbian” is someone who is a “non-man attracted to non-men”.

Amid this erasure of women from lesbianism, there was something particularly lovely — and not just for lechers — about the case of the lesbian beauty queens Miss Argentina Mariana Varela and Miss Puerto Rico Fabiola Valentin who met at the Miss Grand International pageant in 2020 and married last year; supernaturally beautiful, both had surveyed the men of the entire planet and found them inadequate. And yes, of course it’s a proper pay-day for capitalism when two brides decide to outdo each other in the grandeur of their marital meringues — but it’s also gorgeous to see femininity unbound.

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

It confirmed that modern lesbianism, far from being the furtive trauma of the past, has the potential to be a hen-night that never ends, avoiding that morning-after let-down when one of the giddy girls is given away by one sober suit to another and must now knuckle down to the humdrum habits of adult life. Even when lesbianism begins as little more than a cheap thrill or a style tip, it has the power to bring down worthless heterosexual unions, which can only be a relief all round. All that disposable income and free time can’t help but give a happy couple a head start when it comes to fun — and, of course, the unshakeable advantage of doing something that society doesn’t really approve of, which has a way of keeping people young like nothing else. Which is all the more reason why it must be guarded from incursion from the male sex. When I was a youngster, the sure sign of a creepy man was that he would refer to himself as a lesbian trapped in a man’s body; it still is, only this time they don’t slink away nursing their semi when you laugh at them, but call you a fascist.

So, back to my adored Doc Stock, hated so often not for her words but because she shows what a woman is; not the way you dress, or sit, or present. It can’t be bought. A woman is whatever a woman wants to be — and what a man cannot be. And, most of all, what a man cannot be is a lesbian.

But just as social mobility has stalled, so has sex. Faced with an online bedchamber of horrors since they were pre-teens, successive generations are holding on to their virginity longer and having less sex. The proliferation of porn since the Seventies has changed us from chastely yearning swains, capable of producing beautiful sonnets, to masturbating chimps — a process completed during the sad months when we were warned not to touch anyone except ourselves.

Meanwhile, young feminist thinkers have reclaimed monogamy, convinced that all permissiveness offers is men who take, in Germaine Greer’s memorable phrase, “joyless liberties” with them. Once girls stayed virgins for fear of burning in Hell; now they stay virgins for fear of being choked to death by a callow suitor who has picked up his smooth moves from playground porn.

Suggested reading

The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

We may be vaguely aware that there was once something better than this, but we have no idea how to go about regaining it. It’s always tempting to think that throwing money at a problem helps. Enter capitalism. The commodification of sex starts with pornography — where one literally chooses from a menu of flesh — and ends up with those nutters who get “physical with” model aeroplanes they claim to be in “love” with. But it also provides the wily entrepreneur with an excuse to get rich quick. Having ruined the sex lives of young men by confronting them with super-schlongs, the market then sells them the chemicals that can “cure” them; the most recent sales figures from Viagra Connect show that more than 60% of users are between 25 and 54 years old. Young women, meanwhile, blaming themselves for their lovers’ difficulties, will spend thousands of pounds while still in their gorgeous 20s trying to emulate the actresses they see writhing on screen.

Sometimes the discourse around these sexual accessories reveals unintentionally amusing things about both the buyers and sellers. Lily Allen probably didn’t mean to out herself as a prude when she stated that she didn’t know how to masturbate before she started using “sex toys”. But how else to explain: “I felt weird trying to give myself pleasure. It didn’t feel like something that felt natural to me — then I discovered sex toys and it broke the barrier of intimacy with myself.” Does she think Down There is too dirty to touch? Likewise, though the sexually naive may have found it arousing to see photographs of Cara Delevingne and her girlfriend lugging a £360 “sex bench” into their house, it made me think: “that relationship won’t be lasting much longer”. Within a year, it was over.

It remains a rule of thumb that if you need to spend money on sex, you’re probably not doing it right. But in our efforts to make monogamy last longer than is natural, we’re prepared to purchase endless hardware. We’re so steeped in the flagrantly dumb culture of “retail therapy” that it pollutes the most intimate areas of our lives, giving a glossy sheen to the corrupted heart. The Fifty Shades books were just as reliant on the fiscal as the physical for their appeal: substitute a succession of shabby mobile homes for the string of private jets and suddenly getting bashed about by the boyfriend doesn’t seem luxurious.

Suggested reading

Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

So, given the popularity of property porn and porn proper, it was dismally inevitable that Netflix’s How To Build A Sex Room would happen. The presenter Melanie Rose is one of those Game Old Birds who signals sensibleness through her shoes and specs but hints at a raunchy past with cropped hair and Statement Lippy. For over 15 years, Rose has been making “high-end” (over-priced) sex rooms for “bankers, teachers, cops” and more. I’m sure this was meant to be reassuring, but considering that last year a policeman became a household name for abducting and raping a young woman, it failed to give me the warm, snuggly feeling intended.

Still, the couple in episode one, Taylor and AyJay, eyes a-pop with anticipation, reassured Rose (and each other) that “we love each other and we love having sex and we’re ready to have a space to spice things up with a space where we can push ourselves, push the boundaries of our relationship!” Perplexingly, Taylor and AyJay desired “a sex dungeon — but not in any way that a dungeon implies”. Even more puzzlingly, they liked the fact that it was “hidden away, and no one knows that it’s there… It’s a pretty hot little secret”.

Well, unless Netflix has lost even more viewers than they let on, a secret is one thing the couple’s sex room is not. Which is the point. Despite the alleged variety of these couples’ tastes, they’re drearily alike in that they’re all exhibitionists. (Though one man in episodes four and five was very romantic, having asked Rose to help him propose marriage to his girlfriend.) By the time the “polyamorous family” — all seven of the dirty swine — rock up in episode four, you’ll want to watch a documentary on a religious order, just to break the monotony.

More from this author

You can't teach good sex

By Julie Burchill

Rose’s RP is clearly meant to give the show a frisson of incongruity, but ends up blurring the tours of various shag-palaces into one. She is not prepossessing, but knowing how horny Americans find English accents, I’d guess that the show’s appeal across the pond is the crisp way she says “tit” — like Mary Poppins on poppers. But her superior air rubbed me up the wrong way. Goodness knows I’m not the wokest, but watching this posh white woman instructing attractive African-American couples on how to have orgasms categorically turned me off.

Watching yet another couple gag each other prior to a good flogging (otherwise known as “impact play” — that creepy infantilising thing again), I reflected that, far from being a bit of fun, such antics may express sublimated resentment between long-married couples. Isn’t gagging what he longs to do when she tells the same story for the nth time? Isn’t flogging what she wants to do when he swipes the remote control? I couldn’t help thinking of the day these couples break up and argue over their sex room’s contents in a small claims court — now that I would pay to watch.

I suppose it shows how far we’ve come that no one will think that any of these couples is immoral. These days, ninnies reserve such judgement for bad people like Boris Johnson, who they childishly scold for “cheating”. At least Rose’s subjects are trying their very hardest — indeed, going to extreme lengths — to remain monogamous. (Except in the case of the seven swine.) But they are certainly misguided to ignore the simple truth that when you’re in the first flush of horniness, every room is a sex room, and when the thrill has gone, no room is — no matter how much money you spend on your “high-end” consolation prize. 

On the morning of my 63rd birthday this month, I posted a quote by Kingsley Amis: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.” Looking back at my long, louche life, it’s a philosophy I thoroughly concur with. But for me Weston-super-Mare is not a graveyard, but rather the crucible of my ambition.

You couldn’t blame them; going on the game made more sense than a pretty teenage girl from a blue-collar book-free home announcing that she was planning to be A Writer. But that, aged 12, is what I knew I wanted to do. No one summed up my interesting situation better than Kate Bush: “I found it very frustrating being treated like a child when I wasn’t thinking like a child… I felt I was being patronised, right through until I was 18 or 19. From the age of ten I felt old.”

More from this author

You can't teach good sex

By Julie Burchill

At the age of 17, I escaped, winning my first job as a writer at a music paper, taking to a life of — literally — sex, drugs and rock’n’roll every bit as easily as I’d imagined I would since I was 12. My life certainly turned out not ordinary, to say the least. By the age of 35 I had been divorced twice, losing custody of my beloved son Jack the second time; at weekends we would hop on the train to my parents’ home in Bristol, and then set out next morning to Weston. But the lido was no more; they’d concreted most of it over so it was a quarter of the size, demolished the majestic diving board edifice, installed a wave machine and called the whole hot mess The Tropicana — “It’s fun and fruity, wet and wild!” It would have been easier to get a decent swim in a spittoon — but so long as Jack was happy, I was too.

More from this author

The hidden virtue of reality TV

By Julie Burchill

The young women of today have other expectations, apparently. In her new book Losing It: Sex Education for the 21st Century, Sophia Smith Galer scolds that sexual health service budgets have been cut by 25% since 2014, around the time she left school. She believes this has profoundly affected her life. “The sex myths that I unknowingly subscribed to went on to destroy my first sexual experiences,” she writes. “I spent my eighteenth year viewing my body as a failure… Nearly a decade later, I think quite differently. I see someone who was failed.”

But doesn’t everyone today feel failed in some way? There’s a “there-there” tone to Smith Galer’s writing which seems somehow incompatible with the swashbuckling nature of sex. Indeed, sometimes this book seems less about sex as the slappers of my generation understood it — something which would at least be fun and at best bring love — and more about feelings (preferably hurt ones) and “validation”. Still, despite my initial fears of Wokedom (“We need to be intersectional when we probe our sex lives”), Galer is not afraid to criticise other cultures. It is a relief from the relentless message from certain fauxminists that the white Western world is a hellhole unlike any other for women.

The ludicrous and often lethal value placed upon virginity in parts of Africa and much of the Middle East is examined in grim detail; I’ve never come across anyone who mentioned the lives of women in the West Bank without dragging in wicked Israel, but here we read of “Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian girl from the West Bank who died of multiple injuries in 2019. Thousands at the time expressed concern that she might have been killed by her own family members on the basis of photos that she had posted with her fiancé.”

More from this author

Teenagers need to have sex again

By Julie Burchill

Which is not to say that sex is a day at the nudist beach for Western women either. The author has come up against some grim stuff in her life; though much younger than me, she experienced a sex educator who told her: “Every time you have sex, you will lose your special glue. And when you have lost all of your special glue, no husband will love you.”

But many of the ignorant idiots involved aren’t worth railing at: “Countless interviewees have told me how this (idea of virginity) has affected their actual sex lives, including one woman whose partner told her ‘You can’t get into heaven now’ when they had sex for the first time.” Breast-beating and soul-searching aren’t the correct responses to this sort of thing; a quick knee in the groin and a cry of “Neither can you, Numb-Nuts!” might be a better reaction.

Thankfully there’s a chapter on asexuality because by the time you’ve finished this book, you’ll be in the mood not to be In The Mood. This is something Sophia seems to understand — “sexlessness… exists perhaps not in spite of sexual liberation, but because of it” — while not grasping that books like these, presenting sex as a vale of tears, might well be part of the problem. It’s only slightly less off-putting than Laurie Penny’s ridiculous new book, Sexual Revolution, which really appears to believe that having queer sex (aka having regular sex but with blue hair) can bring down fascism.

Sex, as a problematic issue for women, was meant to have been “solved” by now. The Pill and divorce lessened the vulnerability which forced us into sexual servitude. The idea of “Free Love” also promoted in the Sixties promised that men and women could come together as free agents, motivated by nothing but pure pleasure — and nobody would get hurt.

Suggested reading

The rise of the liberal groomer

By Mary Harrington

But somewhere between burning bras and online pornography something went awry, and now young women may well find themselves called upon to enjoy being slapped and choked as part of a “fulfilling” sex life. Now, it seems, getting hurt is part and parcel of having sex; as Rousseau might have said “Woman was born free, and she is everywhere in chains.”

And now, the state is increasingly giving hormones and amputations to young people with body dysmorphia. That is a true example of women being “failed” in sexual matters. But the young Smith Galer isn’t interested in inquiring why girls are submitting in droves to having sex organs hacked out of their unformed bodies — so great is their fear of growing up to be the mere Whack-A-Mole of orifices which they see in online pornography from childhood. Consider the admission of teen idol Billie Eilish: “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11… I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much”, adding that it made her feel “cool” and “one of the guys”.

Suggested reading

The death of intimacy

By Kat Rosenfield

In the face of this, we have Galer’s at times an unintentionally comical blend of sleeves-rolled-up can-do gumption and existential sorrow: “If I do my job right, you will finish reading this book armed with knowledge around sex, relationships and society that you have been both actively and passively denied. I am not a doctor or sex expert — just a journalist who is used to reporting on the fault lines between the spiritual and the corporeal.”

Much as I love my trade, I wouldn’t trust a journalist to give me advice about sex, as I’d presume they’d want to take surreptitious snaps of my subsequent folly and sell it to the papers.  Somehow a profession which invented Love Rats, Threesome Romps and Hot Tub Frolics isn’t quite the one I’d recommend to instruct the nation’s youth in the way of sexual wholesomeness.

I realise that as a louche sexagenarian who, in the words of the old pop song has “seen some things a woman ain’t s’posed to see”, I’m not the demographic this book is aimed at. Of course, all education is a good thing and only a cretin or an exploiter would say that ignorance is bliss. But education doesn’t seem to improve sex either; you can recite all the terms and technicalities and still never understand why X made you want to do Y. You still can’t understand why people risk their marriages, lives, and empires for what is on paper a simple physical function.

That’s why it’s not like just having a cup of coffee, as the swingers liked to say. We know 69 ways to have sex but not the first thing about sexual love — what it is and why it leaves, why it can make us so happy and so sad. At the risk of sounding like an old romantic, getting to grips with the ins and outs of sex is probably the least interesting thing about it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

Suggested reading

Pop can't escape the Eighties

By Dorian Lynskey

The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

More from this author

Would the Spice Girls survive today?

By Julie Burchill

We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

More from this author

What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.

This month marks 30 years since the first publication of the Modern Review, the magazine which I co-founded with Toby Young, my then soulmate, and Cosmo Landesman, my then husband. Toby was a teenager when I met him in 1984, his academic family living next door to Cosmo’s in Islington. When I abandoned my first marriage and small son at the age of 24 to elope with Cosmo, I promptly annexed Toby as my amigo-in-chief. (We were such a close threesome that my son, Jack, was blessed with the middle name Tobias.)

It all started on a sunny spring day in 1990; as we queued for a rollercoaster at Thorpe Park, Cosmo and Toby were talking about Intellectual Stuff while Jack and I — both video game addicts — chattered away about Mario. When Toby joined our conversation, I remember marvelling at his ability to one minute bang on about the Frankfurt School and some bird called Theodora Dorno, and the next do an impression of Bart Simpson. It occurred to me that he was a new type of person — as much concerned with Baywatch as Beowulf — who needed a new type of magazine. And so we started to plot: “I’ll be boss because I’m the rich one and Toby, you’ll be the editor because you’re the clever one.”

It certainly helped that I was loaded. Sometime in the Eighties, in my late 20s, I was earning more than the Prime Minister and the Chancellor combined, simply by writing for newspapers and magazines. Then I pocketed an advance of £100,000 to write a smutty novel about a girl reporter on the make, called Ambition. But there’s only so much cocaine a person can take — and even after I gave away a not insignificant proportion of my earnings to charity every month, there was still quite a bit left, so I started us off with a few thousand.

A saintly patron since my impoverished teenage days, Peter York, declared his willingness to invest — and John le Carré sent us a cheque too. But it was tireless Toby who did the legwork; after a year of begging letters he amassed £16,666.50 — just £1,983,333.50 short of his £2 million target.

Suggested reading

The dying art of the hatchet job

By Dorian Lynskey

Toby used to say that he had “negative charisma”; he’d walk into a room and everyone would loathe him. Cosmo told me that he’d given Toby the classic anti-hero novel What Makes Sammy Run — and Toby read it as a users’ manual rather than a cautionary tale. But I never saw that: I adored him. He was full of life — more exuberant than anyone I’d ever met. So I wasn’t surprised when he gathered around him a coterie of very clever youngsters who got it completely.

LOW CULTURE FOR HIGHBROWS was our strap-line; inside our first issue of Autumn 1991 our two-page mission statement was accompanied by images of Bart Simpson and Roland Barthes. “Imagine if FR Leavis was editing Smash Hits!” I said at the time.

The run-up was very dramatic — as Toby put it a decade ago: “We couldn’t afford a laser printer, so the literary editor, who also happened to be the assistant arts editor of the European, sneaked us into Robert Maxwell’s newspaper emporium and showed us how to use the equipment. When Maxwell found out he applied for an injunction against the magazine and, when that failed, pursued us through the courts for damages.” On the eve of the court case, which would have without doubt bankrupted us, Maxwell went for a midnight swim — and we were off.

I didn’t keep anything from those days, but Cosmo still has a collection of old copies, including an ironic “home-shopping catalogue” supplement that features a Julie Burchill doll, basically a Barbie dressed in black with dark hair: “Pull the string and she tells you how much she earns.”

The covers and headlines were funny and forthright – “KEANU REEVES – YOUNG, DUMB AND FULL OF COME”; “WHY PRINCE CHARLES MAKES ME SICK” (Guess who by?); DI HARD: WHY DIANA IS OUR POP PRINCESS; (Me again!) POSH SPICE – IS SHE FUCK!; WAZZA MAZZA WIZ GAZZA? (David Runciman — now a distinguished academic.)

Suggested reading

A brief history of profanity

By Ian Martin

Our writers were brilliant and diverse. Nick Hornby before he was famous. The eternal enigma that is Ian Penman, who I chased down and snogged into submission. A review by one of the Velvet Underground — Sterling Morrison — of a book about the Velvet Underground. A very amusing ongoing column by Cheers writer Rob Long of conversations with his agent. A young Louise Doughty, now a famous novelist, visited D.M. Thomas for writing tips and found a dirty old man. Mark Steyn took down the untouchable Dennis Potter; Richard Littlejohn took a hatchet to the hypocrisy of the broadsheet newspapers and their parasitical relationship with the tabloids.

There was an ongoing column — so pertinent now — called If I Ran The BBC, written variously by Garry Bushell, Mariella Frostrup and Quentin Crisp. See what I mean by diverse? Today, when the word is deployed by the likes of the BBC, it just means people of various hues and sexualities all saying the same thing on everything from the importance of breakfast to the horridness of Brexit.

As for me, when I wasn’t drooling over pop stars half my age, I was getting into massive squabbles with academics. The best one, with Professor Camille Paglia, ending with me elegantly advising her to “Fuck off, you crazy old dyke”, became such a classic spat that it remains plastered over the internet — sadly, unlike the rest of our wonderful publication.

From a starting circulation of 5,000, we were soon up to 30,000 — not a lot, but imagine if there’d been Google back then! When one of our journalistic heroes, the brilliant James Wolcott of Vanity Fair, came to London to write a profile of us, we couldn’t believe our luck. But a few years down the line (or lines, considering the amount of coke I was keeping my young Stakhanovites going with) all was not tickety-boo between Toby and myself.

Perhaps we had just been too close not to combust, like a passionate love affair. The New Lad fad had arrived, and as someone who’d been a feminist since the age of 12, when I shoplifted The Female Eunuch, I didn’t want us associated with it — we were too good for that.

Suggested reading

Substack is doomed to fail

By Will Lloyd

Take Elizabeth Hurley. I thought she was a smasher, and was delighted when she agreed to read excerpts from Ambition as a free giveaway with the magazine. But I was starting to feel I knew her nipples better than my own. She obviously felt the same and upon hearing that Toby was planning to publish some revealing photographs of her, hired a scary law firm to dissuade him. Quite right too. “We’re not bloody Loaded!” I snarled at him.

But it was to be another vamp who put an end to our phenomenal fun. Toby mentioned that he had met — and slept with — a girl called Charlotte Raven and was employing her as an editorial assistant. Her name alone thrilled me, and when I heard that her dad was rich, and discovered that we had a pleasant time in bed — mostly at Blakes Hotel — I decided on a whim that I wanted her to be editor instead.

Toby, understandably, closed the magazine down in the summer of 1995. Charlotte compared him to Hitler, which is when I started to go off her. Our relationship was never going to last; I had my eye on her younger brother within three months, whom I’m still married to after a quarter of a century.

But I think the Modern Review would have folded within the year anyway. We were victims of our own success; all the broadsheets started to poach our writers. As John Harris of the Guardian put it: “Out of all proportion to its meagre resources, it soon comprehensively redrew the cultural map, forever wiping the high-cultural smirk from the face of Britain’s critics.”

What happened to this silly lot of self-important kids? I’m still looking for trouble — and finding it — at the age of 62. Cosmo wrote an excellent book called Starstruck in 2009. Charlotte has a terminal illness; her book Patient 1 is published in November. Toby did the best of all of us; now founder and director of the Free Speech Union.

Could the Modern Review happen today, in this weak world of echo chambers, cry-bullies and cancel culture? I suspect not. We no longer live in a time when two people can be rude to each other without running to the authorities. I feel sorry for the brightest kids of today, desperately wanting to be journalists but terrified that one unconventional thought might find them finished before they’re started.

As for me and Toby and Cosmo and my bright little boy Jack, whose beautiful mind was eaten alive by madness and who took his own life six years ago, we’ve all lost a lot along the way in the 30 years since we queued up, waiting for thrills. But we’ll always have that rollercoaster.

The Owl Service is what I think of as a Burning Book — as opposed to book-burning, which has always been popular at certain stages of civilisational breakdown. When I think of re-reading it — as with Brighton Rock or Ladder To the Sky — I feel something which is almost fear. This, for me, is the sign not of a good book, but of a great book which will never become familiar, giving the reader both the thrill of revelation and the comfort of recognition — surely one of the most peculiar combinations of emotions.

When I first saw the 1969 Granada television adaptation at the age of ten — class war and sexual awakening played out over a long hot summer in a remote Welsh valley — I had never been involved in a love triangle. I was not yet aware that my working-class background would put me at a disadvantage, or that I would soon become obsessed with making paper owls by tracing the pattern on some manky old teacups.

But a part of me realised that the incidents in the book would somehow pertain to the adult life which I was already impatient to begin. I was obsessed with Wales; growing up in Bristol, just across the Severn Bridge, we often went there and I developed a crush on the whole country.

Suggested reading

Lessons in lockdown from a psychiatric ward

By Frances Wilson

Full of castles and mountains, as opposed to palaces and hills, everything seemed bigger and better in Wales — despite its shocking subjugation by England, despite all the valleys flooded to make reservoirs for the English. In an age of nations jostling for victim status, Wales remains a country that does not seek to be understood too quickly, if at all. And at a time when countries clamour for historical apologies, it’s easy to imagine Wales viewing one from England with disdain. Too much has been done. As the quote from the poet R.S Thomas says at the start of the book:

“The owls are restless. People have died here. Good men for bad reasons, better forgotten.”

When I saw the TV show, I was stimulated — probably in a not altogether wholesome manner, due to the extreme beauty of the 19-year-old actor Michael Holden, brought up in a shepherd’s cottage in Snowdonia — but when I read the book I was spellbound. Alan Garner, now 86, is a character as fascinating as any of his creations. From a working-class Cheshire family he survived several life-threatening illnesses as a child; at the age of six, he was punished for speaking in his native accent when a teacher washed his mouth out with soap. The first member of his family to go to university, Oxford led him to the familiar situation of working-class children removed from their culture: “My family could not cope with me, and I could not cope with them… I soon learned that it was not a good idea to come home excited over irregular verbs.”

Suggested reading

Would the Spice Girls survive today?

By Julie Burchill

The Owl Service was his fourth novel, published in 1967, influenced by a legend from The Mabinogion — the earliest prose stories in the literature of the British Isles, compiled in Welsh in the 12th century. The theme of a woman torn — literally, towards the end, as owls and flowers compete to take over her body — between two men was as relevant in the Swinging Sixties as it is now in the Tremulous Twenties.

But it’s striking that our culture has in some ways moved back towards the Medieval origin of the book’s inspiration compared to when it was published. In some ways, this is good. There is the emergence of Wales as a proudly independent nation once more, setting an example of how it is perfectly possible for a people to vote both for Labour and for Brexit.

Then there is the revival of the Welsh language; with the Act of Union in 1536, Welsh was all but banned, with a parliamentary report describing it as “a manifold barrier to the moral progress of the people”. Yet in 2008 Welsh was used at a meeting of the European Union’s Council of Ministers for the first time; in 2018 it was debuted in Parliament.

But other reversals are not so pleasing. The Owl Service is, at heart, a book about how even the most ordinary middle-class youngsters will likely lead far more interesting and rewarding lives than the most exceptional working-class kids. The savagery of class divisions, helpfully obscured these days by the liberal establishment’s obsession with race, has led to the grotesque situation where social mobility is reversing rather than improving, as it appeared to be in the Sixties.

Suggested reading

Mental health is a lucrative business

By Julie Burchill

Garner spent four years on the book, learning Welsh “in order not to use it” — now that’s a writer. The writing is as plain as only a genius dares; the very first exchange between the housekeeper’s son Gwyn and the house’s heiress Alison — “How’s the bellyache?” “A bore” — tells us exactly which social class they are from.

In the local shop, two ordinary women discuss quite matter-of-factly how the ancient myth of the love triangle which saw two men dead and a woman turned into an owl is about to happen again. “There’s no escaping, is there? I’ll have a packet of snow flakes.”

Re-reading it, I thought most of all of the awful plight of today’s teenagers under the pandemic — grounded for what should be the most exciting time of discovery in their lives. Already having less sex than my generation, the plague (and pornography) has made the sexes even more foreign to each other, echoing the simmering chastity which torments the trio of teenagers whose trials make up the plot of this book.

Penelope Farmer wrote: “I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service.” Over the past year, we have all been Alison, Gwyn and Roger, hog-tied by history, mired in hysteria and caught up in a blindfolded paranoia which makes us see our fellow citizens as harbingers of death. We are all trapped in the valley now, wondering where all the flowers have gone and whether we will be the next prey of the parliament of owls.

The Spice Girls are exceptional in many ways, but especially because anyone who was over the age of five in 1996 — anyone who regularly spent time in a playground — will have memories of them. “Girl Power” was always going to win over a cohort who saw boys as smelly items who couldn’t be trusted not to put something nasty down your blouse. The pervy old Jim Morrison line “The men don’t know… but the little girls understand” had never been so accurate — or so wholesome.

But you don’t get success on the scale the Spices won unless it’s a family affair. The writer David Sinclair said that “Ginger, Posh, Baby, Sporty and Scary were the most widely recognised group of individuals since John, Paul, George and Ringo”, largely thanks to their ability to excite the young while reassuring the old. It sent “Wannabe” to Number One in 37 countries; Spice, the album it came from, became the best-selling album by a female group in history and was followed by merchandising deals worth more than $500 million by 1998. They have won five Brit Awards, three American Music Awards, four Billboard Music Awards, three MTV Europe Music Awards and, last year, they became the youngest recipients of the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music.

Yet — in the manner of the waiter who once asked George Best “Where did it all go wrong?” as he delivered room-service champagne to the footballer and his Miss World companion, who lay in her underwear on thousands of pounds which Best had won in a casino that night — there’s a certain sort of no-mark male who on hearing the words Spice Girls will sneer “Friendship never ends, eh?”

Suggested reading

The dangers of decadence

By Julie Burchill

Certainly one of the girls made a sharp exit two years after their first hit, and their following album as a four-piece, Forever, achieved “disappointing” sales — leading them, at the end of 2000, to begin an “indefinite hiatus” to concentrate on their solo careers. But since then, they have reunited for two tours, both of which were the highest grossing of each year. So, in a way, friendship didn’t end — it just evolved, as friendships must if they want to avoid being boring. The fact that five ordinary girls made all that money from only 130 minutes of recorded material remains a remarkable commercial feat; they were the ultimate Lottery winners of fame.

Pop music is a paradox; it makes an audience of us while being individually experienced, unlike sport where we all see the same thing. Yet the Spice Girls were more like a football team than a band; it was hard to imagine someone sitting alone in their room believing that Posh was talking just to them. They were a communal experience and they seemed to be complimentary parts of a greater entity.

It was sometimes said of The Beatles that they made up one whole person, and while this wasn’t true of the Spice Girls (not everyone is either scary or babyish or posh or sporty or ginger, let alone all at once) sometimes they seemed to make up a whole nation; Geri from a Watford council estate, Baby from London, Posh from Hertfordshire, Mel B from Leeds and Mel C from Lancashire. The Northern girls favoured the Labour Party while Geri, ever the opinionated one, had a pleasant shock in store for The Spectator when the girls were interviewed in their pomp: “We Spice Girls are true Thatcherites. Thatcher was the first Spice Girl, the pioneer of our ideology — Girl Power. We don’t have to agree on politics — it’s bigger than that. Support a woman doing the best she can and that’s it… everyone’s politically different and that’s O.K.”

“Everyone’s politically different and that’s O.K.” Such a humdrum thing to say in 1996, but it sounds so daring now. If we consider the pop groups of today — be they the utterly interchangeable Little Mix with their talk of inclusivity or Mumford and Sons’ banjoist who quit the band after being hounded by an online mob for praising a conservative journalist — is it possible for band members to express counter-cultural political opinions?

Suggested reading

Get ready for the post-pandemic party

By Ralph Leonard

We live in a world where an actress (Jodie Comer) can be monstered on social media for daring to date a Republican. What would be the reaction to a young female singer expressing admiration for a Conservative leader today? In her stated respect for Mrs Thatcher, it’s almost as though Ginger saw into the future, where the Left would become the source of a murderous misogyny, threatening extreme violence if a woman so much as mentions that penises cannot be female.

After all, “Mrs Thatcher was the first Spice Girl” is no more outrageous a statement than “Mrs Pankhurst was a Tory” but that’s exactly what happened after the sainted suffragette had one too many dodgy experiences with the infant Labour Party, such as being banned from joining her local branch because she was a woman. Her mate Keir Hardie may well have stepped in and fixed it, allowing her to join the London one, but the damage was done and she became a Conservative patriot.

Could Geri wear her Union Jack dress today without getting monstered by Bed-Wetters Inc? Possibly, though it is unbelievable that a young woman could name-check Margaret Thatcher and not to be stoned to death onstage.

But their Thatcherism and early anti-EU mutterings reflected the fact that the Spice ethos was was rooted in working-class girl-chancer culture, from vaudeville to glamour modelling. They were so beautifully common it’s no wonder Naomi Campbell asked Victoria: “Why do they call you Posh?” They were the last gasp of Chav triumphalism, now come full circle into the Left’s hatred of the working class for no longer being easy to corral, control and count by head like cattle as they pour into the voting sheds.

What is their legacy? Artists as diverse as Lady Gaga, Adele and Billie Eilish quote them as influences. Whether that’s true or not, their massive commercial breakthrough undoubtedly made girl groups a far better bet, and probably led to the creation of bands who were far better, such as Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Girl groups from the Shangri-Las onwards had always appealed to young women, but girls were mostly offered the chance to suffer alongside the singers rather than be emboldened by them.

More from this author

Why I gave up on education

By Julie Burchill

Things are darker for girls now. I remember my goddaughters taunting their male classmates with “Girl Power”; now the girls of Love Island seek to cheer their friends with empty words as they cry over some worthless man. Today, “empowerment” usually means stripping off for the sake of showing some flesh, devoid of real meaning, whereas once it meant getting one’s nerve up to try something audacious, which might well annoy men.

As for the girls themselves, they all defied their stereotypes, for good or ill. Silly Baby turned out to be the most sensible, preening Posh the earth mother, cartwheeling Sporty the sensitive one, Scary the domestic violence survivor. Geri, always the most fascinating, who was defined by ambition and “bad” love choices, ended up married to a mega-rich and handsome man and became a rather gracious and graceful society matron and philanthropist.

They made being young, cute and up for everything look attractive, rather than the hyper-sexual, self-destructive danse macabre it so often seems today. They may not have been the best singers, songwriters or dancers in the history of pop, but in their unique gang mentality — echoed today in the way the Love Island girls, for all their empty words, appear to have far more fun with each other than with the boys — they embodied the comfort and fun of friendship which often outdoes the heavy lifting of love.

I once saw a television debate between the philosophers Ernest Gellner and Charles Taylor in which they suggested that humankind could be divided into the Tough and the Tender; I think I probably score high on the Tough side of the spectrum. I know that mental illness is real; it killed my son and has blighted the life of my best friend. But I do believe that many people could make themselves better. Resilience is like a muscle which grows weak with lack of use; human beings are born tough, but the fussing of an over-cautious society weakens them.

Mental illness has gone from being an ailment that we dare not speak of to one that we cannot escape; whenever I turn on Radio 4, I guarantee that the words “mental health” will be spoken within ten minutes.

But it’s not just a media problem; Ulrika Jonsson recently stripped off “to highlight the importance of men’s mental health” and to urge fans to donate to the charity StrongMen. What did her naked body have to do with it? I suppose 30 years ago it might have cheered some sad men up. But as it was, it was hard to define exactly who benefited.

Meanwhile, criminals are being spared jail for the sake of their mental health, the most recent example being when a cocaine-crazed driver left a nursery nurse with a fractured skull after running her over while talking on the phone and doing 63mph in a 30mph zone. Yasmin Jenkins was left in a coma and she is unable to return to work. But when sentencing her attacker, Clare Cassidy, earlier this month, Recorder Robert Lazarus noted: “You have a history of long-term mental health problems and I accept you are genuinely remorseful. I also note your mental health problems may deteriorate if sent to prison.” So that’s alright then!

More from this author

What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that he “avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can”. I thought of him as I picked up the latest book by Matt Haig, who has perpetuated his own troubles very successfully indeed. The Comfort Book is the latest in Haig’s canon of woe, preceded by Reasons To Stay Alive (2015) and Notes From A Nervous Planet (2018). It is, we’re told, “a collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better”.

One of the signs of serious depression is the inability to be creative, but Mr Haig, who attempted to commit suicide aged 24, has been a veritable one-man library-stuffer, writing eleven children’s books and seven novels since he started out in 2004. He has, since then, also been signed up to something called The Mental Health Speakers Agency, along with Love Island’s Dr Alex and Blair Island’s Alastair Campbell. According to his profile, “Matt’s refreshingly honest and composed approach to a heavy topic makes him a hit time and time again” — which made me laugh as it sounds like an escort agency. Still, I’m sure it’s a lovely little earner; singing the blues will soon have you rolling in the greens.

Which brings us back to The Comfort Book. It’s very much what I think of as an UnBook, the sort of thing people who don’t like reading give to fellow illiterates at Christmas. If it were a garment, it would be a onesie. If it were food, it would be mashed potato. If it could speak, it would say “I’m here for you”. Keen not to startle us, Haig soothes us with an almost tangible hush: “You can place it beside your bed or keep it next to the toilet. You can throw it out of the window.” Option three, please!

He also reassures us that “You can tear out the pages”. But where to start? There’s so much to loathe: “We are all things. And we connect to all things. Human to human. Moment to moment. Pain to pleasure. Despair to hope.” “You were born worthy of love and you remain worthy of love. Be kind to yourself.” “Walking one foot in front of the other, in the same direction, will always get you further than running around in circles.” “It’s okay to be the teacup with a chip in it. That’s the one with a story.” It’s like that all the way through.

Suggested reading

Meghan's empty confession

By Louise Perry

But do we really need encouragement to be any soppier than we are? We are already a society in which dealing with one’s emotions privately is equated with “bottling it up”, which must surely lead to mayhem in the future. Indeed, this is the central argument of the current war between the Windsors and Sussexes; that processing and mastering one’s feelings alone is some sort of sham. But seeing the photographs of the Queen having a laugh at Royal Ascot last week, and comparing her resilience to the Sussexes’ ceaseless whining, this seems a spectacular own goal. All we see in the wars of the Windsors is an attempt by the Sussexes to “strength-shame” anyone who won’t put their personal problems in the shop window for all the world to pick over.

Of course, the mentally ill have always been with us, and always will be. But surely every other person didn’t have issues until they realised that it would get them attention? Rather like what one does in bed, a person’s neuroses are generally the least interesting thing about them, unless they are profoundly dull. Look at Churchill; a lifelong sufferer from severe manic depression, frequently suicidal — “I don’t like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through… I don’t like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water” — but he never let it get in the way of leading a tiny nation into battle against the might of the Nazi war machine.

When I was a girl, I couldn’t wait to be a grown-up. I imagined that adult life was dangerous and exciting, and I was eager to get out into the fray. But now the craze for over-protecting children (as I write, doctors have just begged parents to stop bringing record levels of children suffering from colds to A&E!) has spread to the adult world with its endless waffle about pampering, self-care and me-time — and “journaling”, of course, so we can all have a chance of producing our very own Comfort Book.

Suggested reading

Are Twitter trolls mentally ill?

By Tom Chivers

Talking of which, I must admit that I suffered a touch of “low mood” myself — quickly mutating to high dudgeon — on seeing my adored Stoics quoted in this quivering blancmange of a book. Far from feeling the need to cosset and baby ourselves, Marcus Aurelius said that the strong — which most of us are and which just a few, like my poor son, are not — should positively give thanks for misfortunes: “It’s unfortunate that this has happened? No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it — not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.”

Indeed, if you must seek advice on how to live life, have a look at The Daily Stoic website; just ten minutes of study a day will turn your attitude around, as it did mine. There are even a few good self-help books — The Power Of Now, Feel The Fear And Do it Anyway — which see the world clearly as the big bad beautiful thing it is, and advise extreme boldness in engagement with it.

If you want to live your one and only life in a self-soothing fashion, go ahead. But don’t be surprised when you’re on your deathbed with only half a life to look back on. Because fortune favours the tough — and has a habit of swerving the tender.

Knowing that my mother wanted me to be popular, I would shun my classmates when they came to call, instead going to the local library first thing on a Saturday morning and returning home with an armful of books which I would sit and read like a machine. Even as a teenager, I used books as deadly weapons long before I learnt how to use words as them; lying in the park reading Lolita in my school uniform the summer I turned 14, I regarded the dirty old men who tried to chat me up with a newly informed contempt. It was me and books against the world.

I mention this because an early love of reading is supposed to lead to a desire for education. But I never once wanted to go to university, and I wonder if this came about because of my early relationship with reading, which was so intense that I resented my parents, my friends, the dog and, more than anything, school — which robbed me of so much precious reading time. Though I knew that, in theory, furthering my education would lead to more, not less, reading, I was offended by the idea that I would be told what to read; to my childish mind it seemed to sully the purity of my love, like an arranged marriage of minds.

I’m 61 now, with the time and resources to become a mature student (or an immature student in my case) if I should choose. But my enmity towards education has, if anything, grown to become almost visceral. There are quite a few words which make me seethe — gusset, feisty, ‘Enjoy!’ — but none are worse than “uni”. Every time I hear it I think of entitled nobodies wasting three years of their lives, believing that they’ll swan out and nab a dream job, with no feeling of urgency that they need to get out there and get started right now.

Suggested article

What Oxford taught me about posh people

By James Rebanks

According to a recent YouGov poll, 60% of Britons would choose to be writers — the highest approval rating of all. For a working-class girl in 1970s England, becoming a writer was only marginally more likely than becoming Queen. Why would I want to sit in a classroom until my mid-twenties when I could be out earning a living and following my dream? On the other hand, I wasn’t keen to follow my parents on to the factory floor, even though I quite enjoyed the poetry of Aleksei Gastev, who wrote thrillingly of industrialisation in post-revolutionary Russia. (Yes, I was insufferable.)

Playing for time, I told mater and pater that I was planning to go to teacher-training college — the only respectable way for a working-class girl to get a further education without being waylaid by long-haired layabouts in search of Free Love — returning to school in petulant mode to do my A Levels. That was the theory. Within six weeks I was in London, snorting speed through twenty-pound notes with pop stars after being rewarded with the role of punk correspondent by the New Musical Express. I hated the music (“It’s just a racket!” as my mother used to say about my adored Glam Rock) but it was my big chance to be a writer and I wasn’t expecting another to come along any time soon.

Punks hated students, even though many of them had been in some sort of further education; John Lydon met Sid Vicious when they were teenagers at Hackney Technical College. A reader sent in a badge saying “I HATE STUDENTS, YEAH!”. I wore it everywhere. I still believe teenage pop stars should be the norm — not a bunch of privately educated namby-pambies getting together in a punt and thinking it might be fun to be in a band.

More from this author

What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

There’s something exciting about the fact that the teenage Beatles (George still too young to legally drink) learnt their trade playing all-nighters in the dives of Hamburg, impatient to get out there and own the world rather than sitting around watching daytime TV for three years. Yet the Beatles were succeeded by the rise of public-school prog rock, made by and beloved of students, and we punky ankle-biters felt a particular satisfaction in giving this cultural blip a good kicking. Or rather, we assumed it was a blip; such a high proportion of chart acts are now so privately and lengthily educated that Cerys Matthews no longer plays records by “over-privileged” artists such as Coldplay and Florence Welch on her radio show.

Do bright working-class kids really want the “privilege” of being stuck in a classroom for an extra three years, though? Obviously we don’t want our doctors to go straight from school to scalpel, but if you’re not training for something practical, university looks like an increasingly pointless rite of passage. After all, the vast majority of Gen Z malcontents moaning about not being able to get on the property ladder are degree-holders who will forever rue the day they first heard of Media Studies — unlike the kid who leaves school to become a plumber’s apprentice and may well be on the property ladder in both Britain and Spain by the time he’s 30. (A few years ago, the Mail on Sunday featured a 34-year-old plumber who earns £210,000 a year, owns a flat in Kensington and takes holidays in the Maldives, having been brought up on a council estate by a shelf-stacker mum.)

The relationship between the working class and education will always be bittersweet. There was a lovely scene in TOWIE recently where Chloe Sims, the glamour-puss Mother Courage of the crew who has spent her life living by her looks, welcomes her younger sister, who has just graduated, to the show: “College girl…” she says, with both pride and bemusement. Reality TV and the social influencer racket has very much become a kind of further education for bright, attractive, non-academic youngsters, the toffs of Made In Chelsea as much as the Essex spivs.

More from this author

How I fell for the USSR

By Julie Burchill

Yet there was something of a scandal when there were 85,000 applicants for the 2019 season of Love Island — more than twice the number of applicants to Oxford and Cambridge. That I was learning my trade when I was too young to vote — and am still practising it more than forty years on when most of my over-educated contemporaries who saw me as a performing monkey left the pitch long ago — makes me very happy indeed.

“Libraries gave us power,” sang the Manics — but too much institutionalised book-learning can eradicate original thinking, making us indistinguishable from the bourgeoise, which is a far worse fate than growing up to be like our poor but honest parents. I was offended the first time someone called me an autodidact, but having looked it up in one of them there dictionaries, I can’t think of a better thing to be.

I wouldn’t have fancied further education at any time, not even when it was free, in both senses of the word. But now student debt means starting adult life with a deficit — even though you may well be paying for the pleasure of attending an institution where students are suspended for stating that women have vaginas and dons are warned that raising an eyebrow may be a “micro-aggression”. Because, of course, the whole wretched Woke lark started in our hallowed groves of academe, where students are taught to believe that, contrary to the Latin root of the word, “education” is not “to lead out” but rather to shut in, the approved manner of learning being no longer listening and debating but putting one’s fingers in one’s ears and shrieking about safe spaces.

As graduation season begins and a new tranche of starry-eyed students discover that their dream job is not waiting to greet them at the other end, once more I thank my lucky stars that I escaped the constraints of my background — and of too much education.

For me, it’s always been different. The Soviet Union was hardly a wallflower at any stage in history; going from Tsarist empire to Communist superpower to an entire era of muscle-flexing under Vladimir Putin, up to and including Moscow’s Victory Day parades at the weekend. But that hardly put me off — for the simple reason that I was raised as a Soviet patriot.

When I hear friends’ horror stories about their parents, I always think how lucky I was. My dad was handsome and witty, generous and kind — even if he was a big fan of a system believed to have killed around 20 million people.

He wasn’t a big reader; it wasn’t the Communist theory he liked. Rather, he idealised the Soviet Union in a manner that reminds me of the images on the cover of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness magazine; people wandering beatifically unharmed among wild animals, the lion and the lamb making eyes at each other.

He was, for example, obsessed with the cleanliness of the Moscow underground stations; in a television film I wrote about him, Prince, a young Sean Bean tells his daughter about Russia: “It’s very cold, very clean… and everybody’s happy. Because the country belongs to them. Their subways stations are immaculate — you could eat your dinner off the floor. Because nobody drops rubbish. Because it all belongs to them — the people.” Never religious, the USSR was his Promised Land.

A clever man from an illiterate, poverty-wracked home, he refused the promotions offered him at the distillery where he worked and instead organised his trade union, in the interests of not being bought by the bourgeoisie. ­After the factory closed, and before he died of the mesothelioma that he had contracted as a teenage builder, his last job was as a ­car-park attendant. He died seeing it as a triumph that he had made no advancement up the class ladder.

Stalin, who was definitely his Top of the Pops, was the peasant son of a drunken cobbler and a washerwoman who outlived communism’s intellectuals and turned his country into a superpower to match the United States. He spoke to my father’s frustrated leadership qualities, I think now.

On the other hand, lots of bright proletarian men grow up with no opportunities and they don’t cleave to a genocidal tyrant — but because my dad was such a charming man, I didn’t mind humouring him. He’d given up on trying to interest my mum in politics early on in their courtship, so I was his little comrade, always happy to stay up late cheering for the USSR during the Olympics.

In return, though he hated “men capering about showing off” — as he referred to the likes of Lionel Blair on TV — he got us a box for the Bolshoi Ballet when they came to Bristol, even if he did refuse to look at the stage, doing his trade union summer school homework the whole way through.

More from this author

The dangers of decadence

By Julie Burchill

Duly rewarded, I returned refreshed to my Soviet-cheerleading duties — mostly composed of urging on the Viet Cong, which was all over the news as they fought their war with Russian weapons, and taking a keen interest in the USSR’s proxy wars all over Africa. (My dad was particularly excited when a young African Communist rocked up at his local one weekend. He became a respected guest at our house until he mentioned how racist he had found the Moscovites while attending the Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia, after which he was promptly sent into exile by my furious father.)

Of course, it wasn’t all Red Army tanks and grim Kremlin faces. Watching the May Day parades on the evening news, it was impossible not to be bewitched by the beautiful Communist gymnasts: Nellie Kim, Ludmilla Tourischeva and Olga Korbut, “the sparrow from Minsk” who was told by President Nixon that her performance in the 1972 Munich Olympics “did more to reduce the political tension between our two countries than the embassies were able to do in five years”. I still remember when Nadia Comăneci, the most gifted Romanian girl of all, was named the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor by the dictator Ceausescu. Suddenly, the popular girls at my school were taking Communist heroines as their role models; never one to knowingly embrace consensus, this left me feeling mildly miffed.

But what I most approved of about the gymnasts was the way Soviet children who showed a particular talent were snatched away from home at an early age — Korbut was in full-time training from the age of eight — and sent to work in academies of excellence; meritocracy at its rawest.

I wasn’t scared of hard work, but I was scared of going nowhere. As a smart working-class girl at a provincial Seventies sink school, the most I could hope for was teacher training college, which I didn’t fancy one little bit. Why couldn’t I be snatched away from my parents and stuck in an academy of writing excellence? At 17, I escaped through a job at the New Musical Express instead.

I’m not sure what my father would disapprove of more; the fact that I let a boy wearing a swastika (“Before Hitler, it stood for peace!”) buy me a drink or the fact that I briefly joined the Socialist Workers Party? (To old school Communists, metropolitan offshoots like the SWP were treated with suspicion, and suspected of practising free love.)

More from this author

How Kate won me over

By Julie Burchill

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I remember my father for the first time failed to do that adorable thing that working-class dads have done forever: call out to their wives to come to the phone immediately and talk to their child. Instead he bent my ear for a good five minutes moaning about the imminent downfall of civilisation. By this time I’d learned more than enough about Stalin’s antics, and I gave him short shrift.

After he died at the turn of the century, I transferred my affections to Israel, and began to travel there and propagandise on its behalf. It helped that Israel was always in the news, so always needed someone to defend it. Why did I feel the need to latch on to somewhere new? I’m not entirely sure. Though if you’ve been brought up to think of an unseen land as your own, it can feel small-minded just cheering on the place where you happened to be born.

I hear of young people calling themselves Communists now; they’re not, they are simply ABEs: Anyone But England. And they’ll have their work cut out should their dreams come true — they’re always Wokers and Woke is the opposite of Communism, based on a strict class conflict theory which would judge identity politics to be bourgeoise deviation.

Certainly today’s revolutionaries share none of the Soviet stoicism that appealed to my dad, his twin pillars of philosophy being Fair Play and No Fussing. Though considering what we know now — the Terror, the massacres, the starvation and beatings which went into making Comrade Comăneci the youngest ever Hero Of Socialist Labor — perhaps there can be such a thing as too much Stoicism.

And yet I occasionally get a flicker of the old feeling; Red Army Choir songs, the image of the hammer and sickle flag being hoist over a destroyed Reichstag, Yuri Gagarin’s birthday. But of course: no image, however beautiful, means anything compared to all the sorrow and pain inflicted by my saintly father’s favourite belief system.

Even two years in I was determined to pour scorn on the harmless young couple: “Prissy… simpering… clothes horse… will only ever be remembered as one of the House of Windsor’s plus-ones… Diana Lite,” I snarked in the Daily Mail of all places.

To be fair, I have always admitted to being just about the worst judge of character in Christendom; put me in a room with three saints and a sociopath and we all know who I’d be blood brothers with by sunrise. True to form, just a few years after laying into the Duchess of Cambridge, I was bigging up a certain American actress thus: “Meghan Markle has never waited soppily for some prince to rescue her. In fact, it seems far likelier that it is she who will rescue the prince.”

What happened to make me transfer my allegiance from Sussex to Cambridge? Two things: hypocrisy and the pandemic.

The first can largely be blamed on the House of Sussex. There is, after all, something grating about lecturing hoi polloi about carbon footprints when your Louboutins are click-clacking up the steps of Elton John’s private jet for the nth time. Later, while their subjects were being told not to leave their houses, there was something farcical about the speed with which the Sussexes struck out for what one feels was their destination all along: a gated community in La La Land; slipping over the Canadian border like draft-dodgers in reverse.

How different from the home life of our own dear future queen. Kate has had a good pandemic, upbeat and modest, sharing photographs of the children and her thoughts on home-schooling; visiting businesses affected by lockdown and just getting on with it. Her appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was unexpected and beautifully judged; she looked like a thoughtful, sad student performing a silent and simple act of sisterhood.

I couldn’t help but compare it to Meghan’s scenery-eating style of feminism, which at its worst saw her writing “inspirational messages” for sex workers on bananas. We all know a Meghan. Sitting on her throne of sorrows, she is the moist-eyed paragon of passive-aggressiveness, soldiering bravely on in the hope that someone will find the heart to ask: “Are you ok?” As for those not brave enough to break free from the Firm, especially that stuck-up sister-in-law with her stiff upper lip — well, she’s just trapped and bottling it all up. Far better to let it all hang out and hold a pity party on prime-time TV.

How unlike Kate. She seems refreshingly liberated from the modern notion that mithering on about one’s troubles will in some way solve them; the Markle-isation of mental health, whereby the super-privileged signal that they too are in pain, so please don’t envy them all this lovely stuff. The Heads Together initiative — led by the Cambridges and Harry — may tick the fashionable boxes, but it appears to have far more to do with service than with therapy: supporting young people, veterans and homeless charities.

More from this author

The dangers of decadence

By Julie Burchill

Meanwhile, the pandemic has made us impatient with the rich and famous lamenting their lives from luxury fortresses, something which led to the all-time low audience for the Oscars on Sunday. In Kate, we see the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, between stoicism and splattering one’s problems all over the shop.

Everything she did which I judged so ungenerously a decade ago reflects well on her now. “Waity Katie” passed the test which far more aristocratic young women have failed: the ability to stare straight back into a spotlight with perfect self-possession.

Though the likes of me gushed over Meghan for bringing “diversity” to the House of Windsor, we failed to register that the descendant of coal-miners and trolley dollies was equally as ground-breaking, and certainly more mocked by her prince’s inner circle (“Doors to manual!”) than Meghan ever was for her mixed-race heritage. Kate even has an embarrassing relation of her own; frisky Uncle Gary, proud owner of the Ibiza shag-pad known as La Maison de Bang Bang, who was welcomed whole-heartedly to the wedding.

She always gives the impression of having known what she wanted, and to be happy with what she has — an attractive quality in a world where screwing up and then griping about it passes for being “authentic” and where those who wear their troubles lightly are accused of being “in denial”. Much as I adored Diana, and found her expressions of emotion affecting and fresh, such travails are now the norm; everyone has an eating disorder, everyone doesn’t get on with their in-laws.

Similarly, I suspect she knows that another bout of over-privileged marital combat played out at peak viewing time is not something the public wants or needs. No one knows what goes on in any marriage and though the Cambridge’s relationship was subject to the usual tittle-tattle about William’s “affair” and her “rural rival” a few years back, they appear to have come through the rumours even stronger.

Suggested article

The Royal Family always wins

By Will Lloyd

Most of all, I like Kate for what she doesn’t do as much as for what she does. She will never throw herself down a flight of stairs, have her toes sucked by an ugly American or travel on a plane called the Lolita Express. Not yet forty, she is maturing from a coltish girl to a grande dame; at the funeral of Prince Philip, perfectly coiffed and clothed and masked, I thought she had a look of the actress Claire Bloom, in the way a young Queen Elizabeth did too.

And so the soft spot that even a hardened republican like me has for Queen Elizabeth II appears to be transferring to her granddaughter-in-law, the perfect queen-in-waiting. It’s telling that the only members of the family not to see an upswing in popularity after Prince Philip’s funeral were Harry and Meghan, reflecting as it did a life of service so profound that it was the only time I recall the deceased giving express instructions that they should not be given a eulogy. The fashion for publicly foisting one’s emotions which marked this century’s Troubled Teens is hopefully on the way out, helped along by this young woman of humble origins who appears to believe that “Never complain, never explain” is a pretty good rule to live by.

What do you think of when you read the word “decadent”? Liza Minnelli showing her stocking tops while fascism looms in the shadows? Gatsby laying out his shirts to reclaim Daisy’s love? Julia Flyte’s gift from her rich lover, a tortoise whose shell bore her initials in diamonds? Or was it best embodied by notorious porn purveyor Larry Flynt, who died this week?

Merriam-Webster defines it both as “appealing to self-indulgence — a rich and decadent dessert” and “marked by decay or decline  — an increasingly decadent society.” In other words, it is considered either good or bad depending on your point of view. Not many words take in both the fall of the Roman Empire and a chocolate ganache.

Its meaning has, of course, changed over the years. Certainly things seem to have moved on since the late 19th century, when writers and artists favouring outré subjects became known as the Decadent Movement. As always there was a sizeable gulf between the French and the English; they had the deadly serious Joris-Karl Huysmans, we had the savage amusements of Oscar Wilde.

More from this author

What I've learned about suicide

By Julie Burchill

A magazine, Le Decadent, was founded in 1886 to bring order to their principles, but even then your average self-obsessed, opium-eating onanist wasn’t exactly a team player. A lot of it was little more than a Perve’s Charter. But the Decadents shrewdly saw that hedonism could be dignified with a backbeat of tragedy, and portrayed their excesses as a sane reaction to a mad world. As Baudelaire put it: “Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters… Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.” With virtue? Yeah, right.

With the twentieth century, the alibis for acting out ramped up as we entered the Age Of Excuses. The barbarism of the First World War was widely accepted as the trigger for the Roaring Twenties, and by the 1950s psychology had found a deep-seated reason for every last bit of bad behaviour.

Then rock and roll came — and the genie was truly out of the bottle. Girls had always hung around entertainers, but never like this. Not so much starry-eyed fans as scalp-hungry maenads, the groupies of the 1960s and 70s cut a swathe through the equally wanton rock stars of the age.

Many of them found their El Dorado in David Bowie, a rock star who seemed to exude decadence with each breath. Could that explain why he was allowed to have sex with underage girls and watch his popularity soar, while other men in his position would have been pilloried?

Suggested article

Get ready for the post-pandemic party

By Ralph Leonard

Perhaps it was simply because he didn’t seem to be enjoying it that much. His decadent behaviour was soundtracked by the splendid output of his cocaine-zombie soul-in-torment period; if he’d acted that way during his “Laughing Gnome” days, he’d have been bang to rights. But played smartly, the decadent card is enough to make people feel sorry for the most egregious of rogues. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” William Blake wrote. “You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.”

But what about those times when it doesn’t lead to a “palace of wisdom”? Today’s decadents seem far more likely to end up in a shack on a cliff edge. “It’s just so lonely at the top,” squeals every showbiz biography ever written, from Charlie Chaplin to the Chuckle Brothers. And judging from the publicity for his Stories I Only Tell My Friends, the actor Rob Lowe seems unlikely to be striking out in a new direction. Lowe had it all: fame, success, teenage girls and even Princess Stephanie of Monaco. But that’s all fine — he just wasn’t happy.

No doubt Marilyn Manson — currently the centre of a huge storm concerning his sexual behaviour — will attempt to go down this more-in-sorry-than-in-salaciousness route if he ever follows up his 1998 autobiography The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell. Perhaps he’ll try to persuade us that he only behaved unpleasantly towards women because he was sad, rather than bad. (Though, while obviously feeling sorry for his partners, one does wonder what they expected from entering into a relationship with a self-confessed Satanist. Foot-rubs and rom-coms?)

Suggested article

The desperation behind OnlyFans

By Mary Harrington

The whole saga reminds me of the English dandy and decadent Sebastian Horsley, with whom a prostitute friend of mine fell in love, having been wooed by his assurances that the relationship between hooker and client was the purest possible. He called himself an artist and the prostitutes his muses — but as he produced very little art, it appears the only thing these muses inspired him to do was to go with more prostitutes. When my friend found out that she was one of many, she was (amusingly) outraged.

But Manson and Horsley both surely illustrate something sobering about decadence: that as you get older, you really need to get over it. A jaded palate appears to make the Decadent “up the ante”, and thus turn from something merely silly into something potentially sinister. Surely, for example, we can all agree that sexually bullying the handicapped is never a good look? Yet Horsley ended up in a foreign brothel having sex with a prostitute who literally had no limbs, while Manson once boasted of urinating on a deaf fan. (Having heard his music, it’s a wonder they all weren’t.)

Still, if you know when to get off, there’s nothing wrong with youthful day-trips to Decadence. It’s one of those things, like love bites and Maoism, which you can indulge in when young and pretty, but look rather sad trying to sustain into middle age. Worst of all, it can make you profoundly boring. Its 19th-century adherents went on to embrace everything from Catholicism to anarchy. I started volunteering in a charity shop.

Suggested article

No sex please, we're brutish

By Louise Perry

Is that really so surprising, though? Not when you consider that the same waywardness which leads lost souls to decadence will eventually lead them out again — unless pleasure has destroyed them before they get the chance to break free. Because while pleasure, whether induced by pornography or cocaine, appears at first to open up a new world, hold it a beat too long and it ends up shrinking that new realm until you become not a Decadent but a lab rat, scurrying about in your own personal sewer searching for the next lever to pull.

When this happens, people begin to ceaselessly lie to themselves about their behaviour in order to continue it. And perhaps there’s a psychological reason for this: being wicked is always going to seem a lot more attractive than being weak. In every branch of the arts, for example, wicked people are glamourised, whereas the weak are portrayed as deserving nothing but contempt. This often leads to self-deception, as the Decadent insists that the source of their chosen indulgence — be it drugs or porn — is magically free of the misery and broken lives which litter its production.

By any standards, one of the most decadent people who ever lived was the Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, a cross-dressing, sex-mad tyrant who ruled between the ages of 14 and 18. The Praetorian Guard, however, were not impressed and he ended up headless and floating in the Tiber. And we all know what happened to the Roman Empire; brought down, in part, by a religion rooted in humility and self-denial — the very opposite of decadence. One can only imagine what will suddenly spring up to wash away the dirt of today’s Augean Stables. But whatever it is, no doubt we’ll pose for selfies while society burns.

Always somewhat detached, I wasn’t broken by the loss of the person I loved most in my life, as is the case with many parents in a similar situation. If anything, it had the effect of making me even more self-contained, or “sociopathic” as unhelpful husbands have invariably put it during domestic squabbles.

I even tried it on for size a few times myself; the onset of tinnitus in the winter of 2017 seemed as good a reason as any, so I took too many sleeping pills before and after Christmas. Evidently, both attempts were unsuccessful. My fabled capacity for taking drugs saw me awaken both times with nothing worse than a mild headache, and a typically immature reaction: what a waste of good sleeping pills, which could have been abused with alcohol to lubricate a few fun nights.

During a Twitter spat a few weeks ago, a number of disturbed people sent me Photoshopped images of my son in various degrees of deathly contortion. In the photos, ranged in age from angelic toddler to the handsome young man he was when he died by hanging at the age of 29. Many of my friends were shocked and reported these people to Twitter. But I felt only mild curiosity at what kind of mind would mistake such a strange action for acceptable behaviour. I even “followed” a few of them in the hope of finding out

Suggested reading

The blight of farm suicides

By John Lewis-Stempel

I am a robust soul, and not one to throw up my hands, clutch my smelling salts and fall down in a swoon when faced with discussion of suicide. And yet even my cold blood has flared up recently for it seems to me that suicide, the last refuge of the desperate, is becoming the currency of the scoundrel ­— and a fast way to shut down debate.

Only last week, Julian Assange was saved from the tender mercies of the American penal system when a judge concluded that subjecting him to incarceration in the US could result in his suicide. He has made no attempts on his life during his spell in Belmarsh. But the scourge of the Western war machine and seducer of Swedes has been spared the American system because he claims to have suicidal thoughts ‘hundreds’ of times a day.

Perhaps I’m being cynical. Perhaps Assange is in a bad way. I do know what that’s like, after all. But I can’t shake the feeling that this latest ruling is symbolic of a creeping tendency in society to allow suicide to be weaponised. Indeed, worse than Assange’s foot-stamping insistence that he could commit suicide if he’s made to go to America (which, of course, no one is allowed to contest), is the incredibly nasty way the threat of suicide is now being wielded by certain institutions charged with the care of fragile children.

I’m thinking of the transgender-affirming Tavistock Clinic and charity Mermaids. Last month, the BBC’s breathtakingly arrogant over-ruling of the Samaritans guide on responsibly reporting suicide was noted by James Kirkup. This holds that journalists should “steer clear of presenting suicidal behaviour as an understandable response to a crisis or adversity”. Yet when three High Court judges ruled last year that children aged under 16 will need court approval to access puberty blockers, the reliably biased state broadcaster saw fit to run an article — since edited — claiming that “Doctors and parents have told the BBC the ruling could cause distressed trans teens to self-harm or even take their own lives”.

Suggested reading

Can our mental health cope?

By Polly Mackenzie

The implication was clear: do you want to be the villain that makes a child want to kill themselves? Yet there’s something creepily unsettling about adults championing the idea that children can be driven to self-destruction by their genitalia. It seems strange to place death alongside sex in such an over-heated way — especially from professionals who have sworn to do no harm. “Let us mutilate these children or they’ll die” sits strangely alongside the Hippocratic oath.

To make it even more heartbreaking, the anxiety-signalling is a distraction from the reality of suicide, now the leading cause of death for men under 50; in part, I suspect, due to a growing sense of alienation and boredom — and the rise of super-strong skunk. Paradoxically, at the same time, there are calls in the West to liberalise restrictions on “voluntary” euthanasia — even though it could be used by waiting inheritors to urge the elderly to do “the decent thing” and die before they become a burden. Surely it’s no coincidence that in Belgium, where liberal euthanasia laws mean that even children can request a lethal injection, one national newspaper recently found that 40% of its citizens would consider reducing the country’s health costs “by no longer administering costly treatments that prolong the lives of over-85s”.

Before the pandemic, the UK was actually relatively jolly: currently 109th in the global suicide chart. (The Swedes used to be near the top, but turned it around in the 20th century, perhaps as a result of Abba winning the Eurovision Song Contest.) But now many of us sit alone, masked, muted and miserable. Those like me, free to work on a balcony overlooking the sea, are few and far between. Millions of my fellow citizens now feel incarcerated — and unlike Assange, they don’t get a round of applause from Pamela Anderson every time they dare to question their current situation. It’s a good job key workers don’t threaten suicide if their conditions don’t improve — but then, the rules for those in showbiz have always been different, and Assange is nothing if not a diva.

Suggested reading

Why I had to leave The Guardian

By Suzanne Moore

Either way, the reality is that calls to suicide helplines have risen by a third during lockdown, while half of people generally feel that their mental health has suffered. The Office for National Statistics also reported that rates of depression have doubled from around one in ten people before the pandemic to almost one in five. And I worry that in a society where suicide is increasingly evoked as a reasonable reaction to people not getting their own way, it will be increasingly hard to know who to take seriously. I’m pretty sure my son intended to kill himself, as he made such a good job of it with very limited resources. But even when you’ve stared suicide in the face, let alone attempted it yourself like I have, it’s still impossible to fully understand its meaning, especially when it looms over someone else. The balance of a mind needs to be quite seriously disturbed before the issue even arises, so it’s hard to know exactly what people who attempt it are feeling. Maybe, with ineffable sadness, they simply want to be seen.

With suicide, there is no certainty — its very nature calls out for examination. And because of this, we should still be free to question the veracity of the claims without being made to feel as though we have blood on our hands.

After my son killed himself, one of the first things I did was go to volunteer at my local MIND shop. Every day as I walked there, I felt him walk beside me. He sat with me in the alcove where I steamed hundreds of pounds worth of clothes a day, to be sent to the shop floor to raise funds which would hopefully encourage people like him not to lose all hope. The charity shops are all closed now, and the income which helped the likes of MIND to ease the burden of the burning house of mental illness has vanished. From this scorched earth, it’s all too easy to imagine how suicide could spring up to spirit away unknown numbers of our loved ones. In the meantime, we must not diminish its cruel impact by allowing it to be used as a bargaining chip when all rationality fails.