In praise of being ordinary

It was a long wait, sitting in the reception of the doctor’s surgery last week. Those MD bastards always overbook their schedule and keep the world waiting.

But I had plenty of time to browse the magazines; mostly rubbish, mostly gossip and mostly irrelevant. Muckazines like Now and New idea and Who discussing the hairstyle of a known baldman or the latest temper tantrum of a TV news reader. Looking at the pictures and the claims to celebrity of so many sportmen and starlets and managers absconding with fortunes, I started to think about Fame.

Back in the sixties Andy Warhol promised everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Sadly, I missed my turn. Generally, then, a person had to do something fairly spectatular and useful to be famous: write a novel that changed the face of society, or  discover a continent or save a crashing economy from destruction. I lived at the other end of Fame. I couldn’t even get a mention in the local parish newsletter for going to church on Sunday.

Then came the era of celebrity. Fame was too hard to achieve the old fashioned way, but any sweet young thing could become a celebrity, often for doing nothing too well, but doing it where people could see their knickers. I don’t know if being a celebrity paid well, or people were celebrated because they weren’t celibate. As people gathered news headlines about themselves, or featured in the social pages, I thought that ceIebrity had very little in common with being bright. did a lot of nothing during those years, and I missed my turn to be a celeb .

Now the great flooding tide is one of popularity. To be a success, I apparently will need to amass incredible numbers of ‘friends’ on the ‘facebook’ web site, or ‘followers’ on the ‘twitter’ phenomenon or get elected to parliament. I don’t know yet if success in popularity would make me rich, or if I will need to spend a fortune throwing parties for gatecrashers that I don’t know, or having a large database of contacts. But I suspect I will miss out in this rollercoaster of an opportunity also.

While I flicked through the magazines in the waiting room, I noted that each step along the avenue of public adulation seems to be a step backwards, and take less talent than any claim to fame before it. The subsequent step, after popularity, can only be further down the scale, to be notorious, or wildly disreputable.  I think a certain rich young girl with blond hair has caught the mood. I don’t know if she is really bad mad and dangerous to know, but she certainly tries hard to create that impression like so many other up and coming young stars in the marked for attention.

It will be just my luck to do something really stupid, worthy of being a front page story in the magazines, but continue to be as ignored as before.