As he said “I’m 100 per cent sure I’m going to die of a smoking-related illness or a non-smoking-related illness.” Eighty-nine is not bad.

I feel only gratitude to the great joy bringer, for that is what he was. He was that rare thing : brilliant, popular and absolutely true to himself. Everyone loves a Hockney. Each for their own reasons. The swimming pools. The light. The trees. A long dead friend from Yorkshire delighted in the work that he made ,when he returned to their native country lanes and found the purples and yellows in the fields and trees, all vibrating away.

Hockney saw the singing colour that comes from really looking. A bliss of synaesthesia . One of my daughters asked for just one print when she got her own place. It was the classic A Bigger Splash. Of course it was.

A spurt of joy.

We spoke of it recently whilst hanging out a a beautiful pool in Sardinia. How do you paint sun on water? How do you hold light? Where does someone go when they are underwater? I remember speaking to him on the phone long ago for a magazine piece. He was easy enough to talk to but it was difficult because even decades ago , he was going deaf and phones are not what they are now . I felt embarrassed by having to shout at him . I don’t think he was. I don’t think embarrassment was part of his repertoire.

The bohemia of the mind is a wonderful thing, it’s unusual these days. Those people are special. I met a chum of his in the airport in San Franciso, one time. Some kind of art dealer (?) with a message to deliver to a mutual friend from Hockney. We had to smoke for England and only drink champagne, which that crew regarded as a kind of health supplement. When we went through customs ,we were stopped. Had he anything to declare? “Some Betty Crocker Blueberry Mix and some extremely hardcore pornography.” David , he told me later, was delighted.

A woman I know recalls the Lightroom where you could see the exhibition 'Bigger and Closer as a religious experience. Well yes ...and I had to be made to go as I had taken against all these so called “immersive” art experiences. What is a Van Gogh for instance if not “immersive”? Why does it have to be 3D?

Well I was wrong about Hockney. It was extraordinary to be bathed in a temple of colour while he explained what he was doing.

A lust for life

Worshipping at the Lightroom. So glad we went….

Louche? Not really because look at the detail and the non -stop work ethic! Look at his drive to deliver, to understand and to experiment. To make and remake pleasure.

Somewhere along the way, pleasure got devalued as if it is without meaning or is mere decoration or is somehow shallow. Surface without depth. Art in it its various convulsions became about horror, shock and some version of politics. All else was simple illustration . But that never happened with Hockney . People got it. People loved it. He played , he kept playing.

Hockney wore his fearlessness lightly . He was openly gay long before it was acceptable. He painted his lovers as he painted his friends. He painted longing. He was not out to shock , he was out to see. And be seen. There is , I read in much commentary , an attempt to retrofit a contemporary politics onto him, to put him into the box of representation. There is no need for such straightjackets.

Isn’t it enough to see what he could see?

The intense glare of the sun flattening everything but desire. The fat rain turning everything psychedelic. The eternal Spring he found in Normandy during the pandemic.

He was hilariously militant about smoking. He wore a badge saying “End Bossiness Soon” . He had thought it should say “End Bossiness Now “but then decided that , that in itself ,was too bossy.

His faith in freedom was a kind of gift. A liberation. He was unembarrassed about beauty. He understood it to be serious. A light has not gone out. Rather we must delight in the burst of his imagery that everywhere. And his attitude. The rapture of Hockney.

Immerse yourself and give thanks.

His family released the bodycam footage which showed the utter failure of the police to help him in any way. He was cuffed, not believed and not given immediate treatment. I don’t know if that could have saved him, but it goes without saying this was an appalling way to die.

Every commentator on this case has been visibly upset by it. Their reaction is human; their tears are real. Maybe that will force policing to be better. Maybe there will be more riots. Maybe we will all learn something.This boy’s death has been politicised in disgusting ways, by the likes of Farage, in the very manner that his family asked it not to be.

I feel deeply uncomfortable about watching the final moments of another. I am possibly old-fashioned about death being an intimate and private moment. Obviously, it is not like that for all sorts of victims of murder and war but what happens when dying on camera is for public consumption?

Something in me feels that this is deeply wrong and that we must pull back from this, but it is too ,too late. I expressed my unease on X ( yes I know that’s probably the last place for a nuanced discussion and I will never learn). I tweeted “I understand why the family have given permission for footage of their dying boy to be made public. But I don’t want to watch it and am unsure that any of us should”

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One: understand that the right has been much more agile about identity politics than the left. The new demographics do not fit the old mantras of gender, race or class. Two: these new identities point towards devolution and the necessity of talking about Englishness. Don’t keep ceding that territory to Reform. Three: years ago, I followed Nigel Farage …

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Positions once taken must protected at all costs. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, one is seen as a good or bad person depending upon a tweet.

Or even by not saying a thing. “Complicity is silence” apparently ,so if you have not publicly condemned Israel you are personally promoting Netanyahu’s war crimes. On it goes, this performance of self-righteousness, not for any actual political purpose but as some strange grooming ritual.

I am guilty of this. I have over the last few years been angry, hurt, sad, vitriolic within the confines of the so-called ‘ gender wars’. I refute absolutely that arguing for women’s rights is a culture war, by the way. Everything is culture . Everything is contested. That is life itself.

This is why I want to tell you about the other night when I went to listen to a conversation between Julie Bindel , radical feminist and Buck Angel, a trans Porn Star. The event was held at the Unherd club.

Buck Angel

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A landmark discrimination case in Australia has seen a trans woman triumph against a female-only app – this fake liberalism is a smokescreen

Is there anything that women can have for ourselves alone that certain men do not want to take away from us? Or get access to? Anything at all? I am asking this not of countries in which women are clearly under the cosh such as Iran or Afghanistan, but of our so-called progressive democracies. Can we have women-only spaces? Women-only sports? Women-only rape crisis centres?

Or as ridiculous as this may sound, women-only apps? Well, not in Australia, where Sall Grover has just lost a landmark case: Giggle vs Tickle. It’s not as funny as it sounds.

Let me explain. In 2020, Sall Grover founded an app called Giggle. It was for women the world over to meet up, whether for dates, flatshares, or to travel together. Having lived and worked as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, Grover was sick of the sexism and harassment she went through. This app, then, was women-only and used biometric software that verifies gender to stop men joining. Why was this even needed, one might ask? Because, apparently, lesbian dating sites are flooded with men who identify as women.

A trans-identified male calling themselves Roxanne Tickle was removed from the site and complained, tweeting that as a trans woman they should be admitted. They then got hold of Grover’s private number and demanded to speak to her. Grover refused.

Roxanne Tickle

Why did this person want to go into a space where they clearly were not wanted? This seems to be the pathology of certain trans activists – or should we just say it like it is: men’s rights activists who refuse to accept women’s boundaries.

By 2022 the case had gone to the Australian Human Rights Commission, where it has just been heard. Tickle was accusing Grover of “gender identity discrimination”. She refused to be “re-educated” or have her site moderated and instead closed it down.

This case, then, was a fundamental test of whether sex takes priority over gender, and Grover lost. On Friday, after a three-day hearing, the judge, Robert Bromwich, discounted Grover’s argument that this person was excluded from the app because of their sex. Instead the judge ruled that Tickle had suffered indirect discrimination because, according to Australian case law, sex is “changeable and not necessarily binary”. Eat your heart out, Richard Dawkins.

But while Grover has lost this case, I know she will keep fighting and take it to appeal, because I met her while she was here in March. She may have been jet-lagged and missing her daughter, but she is super bright, articulate and will stand her ground. She knows a lot of us support her because women worldwide are sick of being told that our rights matter less than a man who thinks they are a woman or who waves a certificate about to prove they are.

We just saw what happened at the Olympics, where a passport now stands in for a DNA test. We have seen the ridiculous spectacle of a biological male running a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh and, yes, we all know that many trans people are not predatory nor want to oppress women. What is for sure, though, is that there are some whose primary purpose is exactly to be validated or even titillated by entering female-only spaces.

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Today is the day so perhaps I need to explain myself. Some people asked me to do that which is fair enough.

It very much looks like the council of the borough of London I live in – Hackney - will turn from Labour to Green. So many inner London boroughs will also vote this way: Islington, Camden, Haringey, Lewisham. This donut affect ,with inner London going Green and the outer London boroughs such as Bexley and Havering going Reform is what is being predicted right now. This polarisation is reminiscent of the Brexit referendum from which British politics has never really recovered.

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One expects a series of speechifying thank you s, especially in a Westminster setting. I wasn’t expecting open heart surgery.

But then Róisín, a star in any universe , talked about what it was like to be “cancelled” . If you remember, in 2023 in a private Facebook conversation she had written “Puberty blockers are fucked, absolutely desolate, Big Pharma laughing all the way to the bank. Little mixed-up kids are vulnerable and need to be protected, that’s just true.”

This was leaked to the press. Her world shifted on its axis. Her view on puberty blockers is actually now NHS and increasingly international policy. As evidence has come in on the harms of these drugs , they have been stopped for under 16s everywhere from New Zealand to Brazil .

But her simple raising of doubt meant that record labels and venues dropped her. It meant literal radio silence even though she had a brilliant album out that would in normal circumstances have got much airplay. It meant colleagues stepping back and it meant insane condemnation on social media and even more insane reviews in surprise, surprise The Guardian. That review in which one of that papers most batshit transmaidens , Snapes, loves the album but launches midway into how her enjoyment of it was ruined by Murphy’s views, causing some indelible stain on the record. This was peak lunacy. What I always wondered would have happened, if Snapes had found herself accidentally dancing to the music. I suppose the homeopathic ambulance would have to be called.

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All organisations that think they have been applying the law on this: u…

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Here they are again, always in my peripheral vision, the tiny papery things that make me feel neither strong nor stable. Indeed, I would probably vote for anyone who vowed to get rid of the clothes moths that I always think have gone, until they come fluttering back. Everything may feel manageable but they are here to undermine that – by the time you se…

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As I am on a break - recovery and all that - and I have paused subs - this one is for free. Here is a little bit more of my Miami memoir. I am now 22. I have made it to Miami and I am working as a waitress in a run down diner. BUT if .you could carry on with the subscriptions /dosh in any shape or form of course ,I would be grateful.

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My work was beco…

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I have mostly been watching the war. I am recovering from pneumonia which I got while travelling. It hit me quite hard, being such a long way from home , I was in the Himalayas actually and it has left me wiped out. Some of you will be much more familiar wi…

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“A trial of puberty blockers for children will be paused following concerns from the healthcare regulator.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has stepped in amid a growing backlash over the experiment, which was open to those as young as eight.

In a letter to those running the trial, the MHRA said it wanted to discuss introducing a minimum age of 14 for participants.

The letter said “potentially significant and, as yet, unquantified risk of long-term biological harms is present to participants”.

Earlier this week, The Telegraph revealed that children would be paid to take part in the controversial experiment.

Discussions between the MHRA and the trial’s sponsor King’s College London will begin next week to address the new concerns.

A statement from the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said that the medical regulator had raised concerns about the “wellbeing of children and young people”.

Well thank God, whatever pronoun she uses. It is halted for now and hopefully for ever but let’s see. Those of us, who have been campaigning on this issue cannot understand why it took a regulator to step in and do the bleedin’ obvious: safe guard children.

That for me, is what so much of this stuff is about: the spectacular collapse in the safeguarding of children in the name of gender ideology has been appalling. If anyone had their eyes open, they would have surely questioned what was happening in plain sight; middle aged men who had often transitioned late in life ,after having fathered children ( think of Rachel Levine , Biden’s buddy) who have pushed for the sterilisation of teenage lesbians. Harsh maybe, but that is what has been happening.

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But I am calling it now: “high-touch” is actually a form of narcissistic personality disorder sold to women as high-level grooming. This goes way beyond looking after yourself (which for normal people might include working out, slapping on sun screen, avoiding sugar and at most the odd “tweakment”). It is a full-time job, which I imagine only those who don’t actually have to work for a living can afford. Think I am exaggerating?

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Yesterday we read “ Khelif confirmed she has the SRY gene, located on the Y chromosome that indicates masculinity.”

Here is what I wrote at the time.

“A woman has been punched by a biological male – is this what we now call sport?

A woman on her knees sobbing after being punched hard in the face by an opponent who has characteristics of a biological male. She may have a broken nose. Is this sport now? Is this the Olympic ideal? Because that is what we have just witnessed. This is apparently justifiable. Angela Carini, a world and European Championships silver medallist, pulled out of a fight with Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after 46 seconds.

I don’t know how she stepped in the ring in the first place. She is no fragile flower but she said she had never been hit so hard before. Through her tears she said she was there to honour her father, and she was a warrior but just had to stop.

As so many have warned, had she continued, God knows what damage would have been done. Controversy has swirled around this match. Both Khelif and a boxer from Taiwan called Lin Yu-Ting have previously been disqualified from the Women’s Boxing World Championship for having unfair advantage over female boxers by the International Boxing Association (IBA). This was not simply because of naturally high levels of testosterone but because they both have XY chromosomes. A simple cheek swab is usually enough to confirm this. Women have XX chromosomes. Their biology is male. Neither of these boxers are “trans”; they were probably born with what is called ‘Differences in Sexual Development’ (DSD) but what it means is that they have the strength and power of males because genetically that is what they are.

Footage of Khelif fighting Brianda Tamara in 2022 shows the force of this boxer’s punch. The IBA at the 11^th hour has said both Khelif and Yu-Ting should not be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games but Mark Adams of the IOC has repeatedly defended the inclusion of these genetic males in women’s categories by saying that Kheilf’s passport says “Female”. What a pathetic argument.

Mark Adams and the Eurosport and BBC commentators who said nothing should get in the ring with this “female”. Their flagrant disregard for the safety of women and any notion of fairness has gone out of the window. Boxing is a dangerous activity for anyone. To knowingly put a woman in the ring with a biological male in 2024 is to legitimate male violence and call it sport.

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Perhaps Peter sees only what he wants to see and in my experience, that means those with power who are useful to him. Everyone else is ‘staff’.

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I always remember a dinner with Peter Mandelson for two r…

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I had no plan beyond the Pyramids but luckily a friend lives there and had offered to show me around. I wouldn’t bother him the first day, I thought. I am a strong, independent woman and surely I can sort it all out.

Indeed I felt quite smug as I chatted to the driver who picked me up from the airport. He would take me to Giza the next day, which seemed ideal as I didn’t want to join a group tour.

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They did not want to undress in front of a bloke who calls himself “Rose”. “Rose” would keep asking them when they were going to get changed. They were made to feel, at the very least uncomfortable, at most fearful by his presence in their changing room. For this they have been treated as monstrous transphobes and have been unsupported in their workplace. Maybe their union would help? You gotta be kidding me. All the big unions go large on gender ideology, they support transwomen (biological males) over biological women every time and then wonder why union membership is falling.

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We need to talk about Fiona. Sure I realise big and scary things are going on in the world, but Traitors is a welcome distraction. I am not even a fan. It’s so slow and stagey at times, it’s like going to the theatre. The theme park tasks do nothing for me either and there is about 20 min of eve…

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“Please tell me the words you use to explain to an unhappy 10-year-old girl that you are going to regularly inject her with a drug that may mean she can never have children.

You are doing it so that her body does not change because she fears the arrival of pubic hair, of breast buds, of the reminders that she will have a woman’s body. This is because she feels disgusted by the whole idea of sex and prefers bikes, climbing, gaming. She dislikes girly things and what is expected of girly girls. She wants nothing to do with any of it.

She likes boyish clothes. So maybe she is boy? Maybe one of her parents thinks this could be the case? Then the juggernaut spins out of control and you end up with a doctor discussing something the girl doesn’t really get: “fertility preservation options”. The injections will make her stay as she is – a way out of what she fears: puberty.

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