This is getting ridiculous - there's no new material from The Mirror but other rags are getting into speculation and nastiness and it's just unnecessary. If it happened, fair enough, leave them alone to sort it out, and if it didn't, let the story die now. In the wake of nothing new to report, I'm seeing personal attacks and increasingly desperate writing (an article in the Express was particularly 'good' - it boiled down to 'we went to Ms Sage's house, she wouldn't talk to us so we talked to her neighbours, none of whom either knew Ms Sage or had ever spotted Mr Clarkson visiting'). It is beginning to have that car crash fascination now, and that's horrible considering it's real peoples' actual lives the press are potentially fucking up.
People have affairs all the time, for many different reasons. This is not, in itself, news, no matter how famous the people involved. During the latter years of my marriage, I had several. I'm not proud of the fact, but nor am I particularly ashamed of it, because there were reasons. OK, so the people here who know me well will know that the reasons were fairly extreme, but even so, they weren't the reason my marriage ended (for the record, neither was my husband's gender reassignment - yes, really - but the fact that in the end he was a bullying, workshy *insert very bad word of your choice because not sure of FG's policy on the one I usually use* regardless of whether he actually had a *insert the word I normally use*or not may have had more than a little to do with it). The thing is, 'Married Woman Has Sex With Other People' is hardly a headline. Even 'Married Woman Who Once Presented An Episode Of A Local TV Show About Death* Has Sex With Other People - Eros And Thanatos To Blame' isn't a headline (though it's possibly a punchline... must store that for later use). I suppose it's part of celebrity culture that you have no private life, but it has never seemed acceptable to me that the press can judge and speculate and publish pages of copy taking the moral high ground when they don't necessarily know where the moral high ground is. But really? My private life makes me very glad not to be famous.
And what if there's an element of truth to the stories, but they have an 'understanding'? That's none of our business either. I know plenty of people with unconventional marriages (for those wondering about such things, they got married because they love each other - that it works is all that matters), and while it does take some getting used to, it's not something to judge them for, or to assume doesn't exist because it doesn't fit with our personal world view. I just wish the media wouldn't decide on a target and attack it until it falls over. Some elements of the British press have been gunning for Jeremy for years. That's got to be pretty bloody wearing, and if one of these days he says 'Look, I'm in my fifties, I don't need any more of this shit, I'm off to write books in Barbados,' I wouldn't blame him at all.
Um... not really sure how I got all that from being marginally pissed off with the press, but yeah. Sorry about that...
*Richard O'Brien's Dead Strange - I think it might have been episode 2, but I'm not sure. I did an article on Victorian funerary symbolism. Well, everyone needs a hobby...