It’s happy ever after for Ed and Cherry
THE delightful singer Ed Sheeran – I met him once in a BBC tent and he couldn’t have been more charming, humorous and self-effacing – has announced his engagement to his school sweetheart Cherry Seaborn. The couple are brimming with smiles.
Their cats, we are told, are thrilled for them. We, his fans, join in the rejoicing. The crucial fact here is just how astoundingly lucky Ed is. For the hugely famous, there’s nothing quite as reassuringly wonderful as marrying someone who knew you way back when. Ed was the school singing sensation. Cherry was the school hockey star. He was shy and abstracted. She was Miss Popularity. She went on to play in the England Under-21 hockey team. He went on to conquer the universe.
Now the two are making one another extremely happy and the rich and feted all over the world are fervently wishing they’d been fortunate enough to keep in contact with – and eventually plunge headlong in love with – a person who remembers them spotty, nervous, badly dressed and waiting for the bus in the rain. In other words: pre-fame.
Superstars have issues. Foremost among them is the niggling fear that no one loves them for themselves. Imagine being followed everywhere by a crew of fawning sycophants giggling over your every lame utterance and putting your straw in your smoothie.
YOUR entourage is on your payroll. Even your parents and siblings benefit from your success. Potential partners don’t even need to Google you to know the sorts of benefits teaming up with you could bring. How are you supposed to believe a single word of the unctuous flattery? You can’t trust. You can’t relax. You are desperate for contact with anyone unmoved by your fame.
In 1996 I interviewed Diana Ross for The Big Breakfast at the Dorchester. I was with a film crew but I’d smuggled my school-friend Francine, a life-long Ross obsessive, in as well. As the cameraman was packing up, we confessed. Diana Ross’s eyes filled with tears. She said she envied our lasting friendship and that when stardom struck, she lost touch with every single chum she’d made in her youth.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to stay in touch with them, she told us. It was that they imagined her new life made them uninteresting to her. She was, she said, pretty lonely. “There are no friends like old friends who truly know you,” were her poignant parting words.
Ed and Cherry have long-lasting friendship which everybody knows is the perfect foundation for living happily ever after. I TROTTED off to see the award-winning film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. For what it’s worth here’s my verdict: script, excellent, performances, compelling, cinematography, sublime and plot, absorbing. Every element of the movie was startlingly good. Why then can I say, hand on heart, that I did not enjoy a minute of it? Forgive me if I seem flippant but I’m writing from the heart. Life’s too short to be bathed in relentless wretchedness, even if the misery created is of the highest calibre.