Captain Moonlight: Hunter goes gunning for Julie

SCANNING the Big Issue, the excellent magazine for the homeless, I came across a short story called 'Away from it all' written by Julie Burchill, the maintenant ancienne terrible essayist. It wasn't very good. I recalled that recently in the Spectator, Ms Burchill had reviewed a collection of the journalism of Hunter Davies, the moustachioed maestro of the interview game. She said it wasn't very good. In fact, she was very rude about Hunt's prose style. And about the moustache. The Captain is not a man to fan flames, open old sores and whatever, so I rang Hunt and asked him what he thought of the story. He was much taken by the accompanying photograph of Ms Burchill, which he said reminded him 'of a woman server on the cheap cosmetics counter in Boots, Carlisle, in her forties, who has had a go at the make-up in her lunch hour'. He said Ms Burchill was a good writer, that he was a fan of her journalism. So it saddened him immensely to find that the short story proved that she had no creative talent whatsoever, and that she was absolutely appalling at dialogue, which she clearly took from the back of a crisp packet. We turned to more pleasant matters. Hunt told me that he has just been commissioned by Michael Joseph to write the official biography of Wainwright, the curmudgeonly hill-walker. Hunt promises to reveal why his first wife walked out on him, and has already discovered that Alf was the first treasurer and secretary of the Blackburn Rovers supporters' club. Beat that, Burchill]