Sideshow

In this mad world, we put certain people on pedestals. Mostly, these people, these stars, are engaged in activities that shouldn't really matter. They are separate from real life. Real life is the channel that the rest of us swim along - farmers, engineers, nurses, teachers, factory workers,  shop assistants, dockers, lorry drivers, soldiers and all the rest.

Without these people doing the real work, living the real life, there would be no pedestals for the famous.

I am thinking about film stars, actors, pop artists, best-selling novelists, TV people, sports stars. They are only there to distract us, an embellishment - like the travelling circuses of yore that were set up on village greens to entertain the local populace. With a few spare pennies jangling in one's pocket one could afford admission to the big top. But it didn't really matter. It was not the real life. When the acrobats and the clowns were gone, normal life resumed.

You might say that we have all been signed up - willingly or otherwise to join the cult of celebrity. They have become modern day gods from Lionel Messi to Meryl Streep and from Stephen King to Little Mix. We are meant to bow down before them, follow their stories, compare the glorious light of their exciting  lives with the anonymous shadows of our own drudgery.

When quizzed about their ambitions, many kids are magnetised by the sideshow. They want to be famous footballers, reality TV stars, actors.  But those people - the ones we see in magazines and tabloid newspapers - they represent such a minuscule proportion of humanity that it ought to make them irrelevant.

Adulation, admiration and aspiration should really be reserved for the everyday people we see around us. They are the real heroes - our fellow citizens including family members. It is far more heroic to swim in the river of reality than to dance like a moth  in the deceptive limelight of fame.