When celebrities fall out, we just can’t mind our own business

As fans of Eastenders and The Archers are all too keenly aware, there is nothing like a significant life event – birth, marriage, death – for unleashing a good old roiling feud – the sort that lasts for generations, until everyone has forgotten what started it in the first place.

In life as in art, some of us have a tendency to keep our grievances warm – and when I say some of us, I mean specifically celebrities. Take, for example, Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker, co-stars of the television and film versions of Sex and the City. Inseparable buddies on-screen, in real life they have been at loggerheads for ages, and now it has all kicked off again (as they say at the Queen Vic) over SJP’S Instagram message of condolence after the recent death of Cattrall’s brother. To which Cattrall responded (also on Instagram) with a tirade that began “I don’t need your love or support at this tragic time”, and gathered momentum from there.

I suppose one’s first thought on reading this might be, “Goodness, have these two ladies of a certain age never heard of the simple handwritten note of condolence and the dignified (if huffy) silence?”

But this initial reaction is instantly followed by another: the discreditable, but irresistible compulsion to take sides.

Is SJP’S behaviour manipulative? Is Cattrall’s unreasonable? I dunno, and nor does anyone else who isn’t personally acquainted with them. But the fact that they’ve chosen to take their private affairs into a very public arena offers a framing device that invites all onlookers to form an opinion.

The dissolution of the bonds of human attachment by death, disloyalty or misunderstanding is the stuff of tragedy, and whether the protagonists are King Lear and his daughters or a couple of middle-aged actresses, the spectacle has an appalling fascination – with the sly twist of all drama: that our reactions reveal more about the secrets of our own hearts than they do about the unedifying behaviour that prompted them.

When my son was growing up I used to astonish him with the news that, when I was his age, my weekly pocket money was half a crown (12p). I considered a 10-bob (50p) note in a birthday card to be a pretty good haul, and £5 a fortune. I can’t remember what paltry sum the Tooth Fairy used to leave for my milk teeth, but it was certainly less than the £1 per tooth that was the going rate in the mid-nineties.

In those relatively innocent days, we dealt exclusively in cash – but no longer. The piggy bank has been overtaken by pre-paid debit cards for tinies. The advantages are obvious, from an early education in budgeting to protecting your loot against marauding siblings.

But I’m not sure that checking one’s online bank statement will ever quite match the charm of fumbling beneath the pillow to see if the cash-forteeth transaction has been successfully completed.

Here’s a dilemma: this year Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, the Christian season of penance symbolised by smearing one’s forehead with ashes, falls on Valentine’s Day, the ubiquitous festival of scentless red roses. How to combine these two solemn occasions? If only someone had had the foresight to resurrect that longdefunct, but hauntingly named fin-de-siècle scent, Ashes of Roses.