WHILE I USUALLY listen to spokes-celebrity views on Third World debt, curing breast cancer or deforestation of the Amazon with a curled lip, the one thing I always enjoy hearing from them is how excessive wealth does not guarantee happiness. It is their only unique piece of wisdom.
The rest of us worker bees can make believe that given a many-zeroed bank account we’d never stop smiling. But the rich, they know.
So what do they do with their one contribution to human understanding? Well some choose to make the best of it, appreciate their fabulous fortune with uncomplicated joy. A friend who knows Colleen McLoughlin, girlfriend of Wayne Rooney, is always, very sweetly, trying to persuade her to return to college and add to her decent sprinkling of A-grade GCSEs. But Colleen — and it seems her tabloid image is true — would simply rather shop.
This is not even shopping as most women enjoy it, a military swoop on major stores, matching top to skirt, schlepping back to the first shop after all, blisters ripening. Triumph! Celebratory glass of fizz with friend, riffling through tissue paper, comparing hauls. You can make a day of that, a life possibly.
But Colleen does not even experience that level of challenge. She just goes down to a single Liverpool boutique where an array of designer gear has been assembled and points her credit card. She is like some captive bird of prey, fed dead mice from a bag kept in the freezer along with the delusion that she has caught them herself. Although routinely mocked as an über-chav, Colleen doesn’t whinge or rattle her golden bars or write a book telling the rest of us how to live.
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This week Madonna published the fifth of her moral-message children’s stories, a tale of a rich merchant, Lotsa de Casha: “No matter how many grand castles, fast horses or fancy carriages he bought, he was still a gloomy old sourpuss.” When he is robbed by beggars and left far from home, Lotsa is forced to work for a mysterious man who makes him deliver valuable objects, antiques and vases etc, to strangers. Therein Lotsa discovers the pleasure of sharing. So grateful are the lowly recipients that they give Lotsa loadsa things in return. Like some gorgeous boots, a handmade coat, a nice dinner, a comfortable bed for the night. And so, children, today’s celebrity moral message is “give and ye shall receive freebies”. Humble gratitude is great, but a goodie-bag is better.
At the end of the tale, it transpires that the mystery man was also once very rich, indeed he previously owned Lotsa’s castle on the hill. “But,” he declares, “I wasn’t happy until I came down off my high horse and shared what I had with others.”
Which is clearly what Madonna thinks she is about, descending from her 1,200-acre Ashcombe Estate — which she fought so hard not to share with ramblers — to bestow her wisdom on our children.
What Madonna cannot see, and no one is brave enough to tell her, is how little her insights apply beyond her own privileged bubble. Her first book, The English Roses, concerned a little girl bullied because she was so gifted and beautiful. The second, Mr Peabody’s Apples, is about the sin of gossip. And so Madonna beseeches us not to pick on or even bitch about the rich, but to marvel at how graciously they walk among us.
And while Lotsa de Casha is forsaking his riches, meanwhile on Madonna’s official website a new line in English Roses merchandise is launched — “after all English Roses love to go shopping” — so little girls are encouraged to nag their parents for sequin-covered Union Jack miniskirts for $76.50 or a $30 porcelain tea set. Madonna revealed recently that she has trained her daughter to pick up piles of clothes that she drops on her bedroom floor by taking them away in plastic bags. Allowing your children to be unfettered consumers is OK, it seems, so long as they’re tidy.
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Madonna may claim to have shed her avaricious Material Girl incarnation, but the conical bra still peeps out beneath Spiritual Girl’s demure sprigged tea dresses. Proceeds from Madonna’s books go to the Kabbalah movement, a quasi-religious sect that flogs enlightenment as crudely as her despised Catholic Church sells indulgences. How about a piece of red string “worn to protect us from the very powerful negative force of the evil eye” or an air freshener to “combine the power of aromatherapy and Kabbalah water to create a revitalizing new health and beauty experience”?
Better your children have their bedtime stories read by Colleen, who only shops for £800 Balenciaga handbags,not her soul.
Rudderless reality
This is the first summer in six that I haven’t measured out my weeks in evictions and Davina’s astounding outfits. But I just cannot face Big Brother 6, can’t bring myself to invest an hour a day in a new bunch of crazies.
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Is it because in choosing contestants purely for enormous norks and shagging potential, any morsel of sweet and tentative romantic build-up has been removed from housemate trysts? Or have Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and Jamie’s School Dinners spoiled me? Now I can only abide reality TV screaming and cursing if it has both plot and purpose.
But how else can I give my summer shape and meaning? For those of us not gliding between Glyndebourne, Wimbledon and Henley, Big Brother is The Season.
janice.turner@thetimes.co.uk