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everyday life than she once was.
“I’m much better than I was. Even by the time I
was 17 at the NME I was well castrated by then. You
should have seen me at 13, at the height of my venom!
I stopped kissing my mother when I went to bed and
when my dad asked why I said ‘What, is she a lesbian?’
That’s what I was like!”
And in fact she does seem more at ease with herself
than I’ve heard she was, and very content with her life.
“Brighton, for all its airs and graces, is a very provincial
town, and I like it that way. I don’t want to be like a
young bunny putting it around, I’m 45 years old, it was
never my way anyway, I got married when I was 18 and
24, even though I always admired girls that did. It was
never the life for me, to be honest with you.”
She seems content too with her role in the grand
scheme of things. “You know that thing you wrote about
me [the Sugar Rush review] was so unique, it treated
me like a human being which was such a change. I love
being round young writers, I like to think of writers as
a community, as a race. I’m 45 years old , I’m not going
to write ‘the great novel’ … a dead mother that’s what
I’m going to be now, and that’s alright with me.”
Already seriously sozzled before the interview
ended (me,anyway) we break off to join her fellow
guests – and proceed to drink a lot more. The ‘mists
of Bacchus’ descend on my memory somewhat here
though I do dimly remember us drivelling on about
BUY Julie Burchill books online from and
many other subjects. Indulging in huge, shared,
over-emphatic praise of Nye Bevan figured highly.
(“Idiots always get him mixed up with Ernest Bevin,
the anti-Semitic git.”) At one point Julie has a huge
slanging match with Zoe and Gary about the merits
of white immigration (Julie is against, she thinks the
UK owes black and Asian people a huge debt which
doesn’t apply to east Europeans). I recall also being
a coward and slinking away during this, talking to
Nadia instead. Nadia has clearly seen it a thousand
times before, and its clear why Julie loves her so
much. She’s fantastic, and clearly the calming, sensible
one of the pair. “Don’t worry, she’ll calm down
in a few minutes”, I think she said. And she did.
At one point I harangue Julie for wasting her life attacking
idiotic celebrities when she could be highlighting
great social injustices as she did for a very brief
period in her Guardian columns of 2002, campaigning
on issues like the still-toothless corporate manslaughter
law which allows negligent employers to get away with
murder (literally, if not legally.)
She explained she found writing such things too
much of an emotional strain, and that it was too late to
change now anyway. She was a nasty, witty old hack,
pure and simple. And she liked it that way.
And of course, that’s what makes her what she is.
The world already has John Pilger. It’s precisely the
fact she has “run away from her brain” as she herself
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