MILLENNIAL DIARY

CIARA O’CONNOR

ICONFESS I’ve been preoccupied, the one question swirling round and round my troubled head, torturing my peace: will Ben Foden ever shut up?

Ben, PR nightmare and disgraced ex-husband of Tipperary Crystal made flesh Una Healy, most recently made headlines for marrying his girlfriend of two weeks back in August. Now, he’s appearing in the celebrity X-Factor (the mere existence of which is surely a portent of the end of days) which means he’s opening his mouth again to muse on his favourite topic: how it wasn’t just his fault that he cheated on lovely Una thereby ending their marriage.

Foden would like to have to his cake and eat it: he knows the only way to rehabilitate his public image is to take full responsibility for his infidelity, however he can’t let an opportunity slide to remind us that Una basically forced his hand (and groin). “I hope Una will forgive me. I made the biggest mistake and the most stupid mistake you can make in a relationship. We seemed like a perfect match but people never know what happens behind closed doors. I think it’s safe to say that Una and I were struggling for a number of years.”

Ben hopes Una, who was “always really supportive of me doing singing and stuff,” God help her, will be there with the kids and their new step-mother to cheer him on in the live shows.

Meanwhile, Una continues to be the picture of dignity and sense; she has been with her partner, David Breen, for a year now and has moved to his town from Northampton where she was based while Foden played for the local team. They live down the road from each other, but not together. Theirs was the classic immigrant-meet-cute...

“We were in a coffee shop and we struck up a conversation actually because we’re both from Munster and he heard my accent and said, ‘It’s nice to hear a Munster accent’, because I hadn’t met very many Irish people over in the UK.

“He was one of the first in all the years I was over there and we just struck up conversation. I think he might have even said, ‘Well.’ They don’t say that over there, he had me at ‘well’.”

He had me at ‘well’ — if Cecilia Ahern doesn’t write the novel, I will.

In words that will surely be balm to the soul of any Irish mammy with a child out foreign, Una added, “It’s lovely because we’re both expats. We’re both so Irish! We come back together a good bit and I just feel at home when I’m with him.”

Lovely. Now, if only that other clown would ever shut up and leave our girl alone.

***** In 20 years’ time, everyone will remember where they were the day that Coleen Rooney invented the ellipsis and eviscerated fellow WAG Rebekah Vardy.

Since 2006, when the WAG was invented, the tables have turned on footballers and their wives; sportsmen have become the extraneous accessories, plus ones for Instagram models and Love Island graduates with as much name recognition as the anonymous footballers have money.

It’s perfect: the logical conclusion of third wave feminism. But it’s meant that the WAG 2.0 has much more to do than clap their acrylics together in the stands and kill time with their esteemed colleagues; the Insta-generation has fast-fashion collabs and hair vitamin discount codes to think about. There’s no time to incubate slow-burning drama like in BadenBaden’s World Cup bad old days. We thought the WAG was dead; we thought the WAGs were nothing more than a footnote in our cultural history, a 2006 relic that was relevant only for as long as graphic tank tops, caramel highlights, and baker-boy hats. We were wrong: the WAG was just resting in the depths, waiting for the day when it would rise up and blind us with its majestic supremacy.

Did we ever really know ellipses before last Wednesday? Did we ever see a series of little dots and truly understand what they meant? Coleen masterfully laid out how she fed the leak stories, from the sublime (the flooding of the Rooney basement — not a metaphor) to the terrible (travelling for gender selection treatment) and watched them end up in The Sun.

Like any 2019 Poirot, Coleen kept the receipts — “I have saved and screen shotted all the original stories which clearly show just one person has viewed them.”

And then, the devastating climax: “It’s… ……Rebekah Vardy’s account”

Coleen Rooney not only asserted the dominance of her kind as the decade draws to a close, but saved punctuation as well. Those cataclysmic ellipses will be used to prove to schoolchildren why the written word matters for generations to come. The WAG is back. I weep. I shudder. I can’t bloody wait.

***** Last week, famous gay Ellen Degeneres found herself in hot water when she was photographed having a laugh with infamous homophobe George W. Bush. Instead of waiting for the criticism to die down, or simply saying, “Yep, for the sake of social ease, I sat down with the man who tried to make it illegal for me to get married and whom a great many liberals regard as being a murderous war criminal, so sue me,” Ellen doubled down and recorded a monologue in which she said that she was friends with Bush. “In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have.” She shared a tweet in which someone said that the sight of Ellen laughing with Dubya, “makes me have faith in America again”. Ellen elevated her hanging out with other rich people in private boxes at football matches to healing broken America, as if being nice to powerful morally dubious people isn’t the path of least resistance.

The howls of millennials could be heard the internet over: for our generation, Ellen always was and always is. We don’t remember a time before this liberal lesbian was one of the most beloved and powerful broadcasters in the US: Ellen could not be wrong. And we could have forgiven her cosying up to nearly anyone — but our social and political consciousness was forged amid the Iraq war; Bush dominated our teens and introduced us to the concept of corrupt politics, outside interests — and activism and protest. Bush awoke Generation Woke.

Somebody projected images of the war’s horror on to the Ellen studio background and put it online where it went viral. Ellen’s people repeatedly attempted to get the edited video taken down on copyright grounds, which only added fuel to the fire.

“But just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them,” she said. For millennials, it’s been an efficient means of sorting the celebrity wheat from the chaff; famous friends endorsed Ellen’s message of toxic-positivity from Reese Witherspoon, to Kristen Bell, Lennie Kravitz, Kendall Jenner, and, God help us, Robbie Keane.

Give me Coleen and her delicious, disruptive negativity any day.