After 10 long years I’m finally in heat

I know some people simply don’t have the time for the likes of Heat magazine. In fact, they’ll make a great show of haughtily flapping their broadsheets right in your face and declaring that your IQ is bound to have dropped several points just by picking it off the shelf.

I’m not one of those people, I love Heat. Don’t know why, I just do.

Admittedly it may not have the editorial content of The Independent, or offer an in-depth analysis of world events – much beyond weight gain, wardrobe malfunctions and celebrities who can’t make up their mind who to date. But that’s the whole point of a magazine like this.

It isn’t meant to replace ‘The News at 10′ or ‘Question Time’ and it never claims to help improve your exam results or boost your earning power. Rather, it’s half an hour of total escapism every week – and, if we’re all honest, an opportunity to reassure ourselves that those celebrities who ‘have it all’ often don’t.

Because, whilst the average reader may not have the fame, fortune or enviable shoe collection of most of the people featured week after week, at least us unknown, relatively broke, Louboutin-less readers are safe in the knowledge that we won’t be photographed nipping out to Tesco in our ill-fitting tracksuits, with hair that looks like an unwashed birds nest and eye bags down to our cheekbones. And we won’t make the headlines when we meet, marry and divorce in the time it takes a normal person to draw breath. And we won’t cause a national panic because we lost a bit of weight, or god forbid, ate too much for lunch.

So I reckon that magazines such as these actually work as a rather handy and incredibly cheap form of therapy for Joe Public. They give you a glimpse into the sort of lifestyles most could never hope to afford – unless your mum was a Rolling Stone groupie and you’ve just found out you can move like Jagger – and then show you that the grass isn’t always greener in La La land.

And it’s for that reason – and the handy TV guide – that I have been buying Heat since Issue 1. Now, 12 or so years on, having produced 2 children, lived in 3 continents and survived one life crisis after another, I’ve carried on buying it every week. And yes, I still have a go at my husband if he dares flick through it before I’ve read it cover to cover.

Granted, I often feel like I’m on the wrong side of 30 for the fashion spread and technically I guess I’m also old enough to have given birth to some of the Torsos of the Week, but what the hell. All those years of trivia and escapism haven’t done me any noticeable harm and I’m pretty sure my IQ hasn’t diminished over the last decade – and if it has, I’ll put that down to having children.

So all of that said, it would be something of an understatement to say I was a tad excited to open Heat this week and see I’d finally won Letter of the Week – I think I might actually have let out a squeal. So overcome was I with shock that I immediately had to call my husband (who totally understood my joy) and my sister, who initially thought I’d won the lottery.

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It’s a funny thing that after all these years of writing, having published a book, kept countless clients happy with copy and received fairly respectable hits on my blog, it’s having a letter printed in Heat that really makes my day. And winning the prize of course…

Now not that my 25.5 seconds of fame have gone to my head, but just in case a member of the paparazzi has driven down the A11 by mistake and is currently ambling around rural Norfolk looking for a way back to civilisation, I think perhaps I’ll make the effort to brush my hair before doing the school run later today.

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Celebrity? Big Brother

So it’s started again. I know because I heard the music, saw the eye and clocked a couple of people stumbling down a platform towards the cameras. Right after that my husband came into the room with a cup of tea, gave me something of a withering look (edged with a hint of thinly veiled desperation) and said “No, really, you can’t make me watch this.”

So the channel was changed and an ancient episode of Brothers and Sisters was put on as a compromise. But Hubby is away this evening so I had a chance to check in and at least see who has been shoved into the house of horrors this year.

From what I can gather there are as follows: 2 women who are famous because of their (ex and probably soon to be) husbands, teenage twins who lost a singing competition because, well, they couldn’t sing; a model that nobody’s heard of; an actor still in nappies; a man with a hairdo like a cockatoo; a gypsy who speaks a whole other language; an ‘actress’ better known for her bodged surgery; an Essex girl famous for being incredibly thick; and last, and most definitely least, a past-it, celebrity obsessed, bankrupt recovering drug addict who spends more time hounding the press for attention than they do her.

So with that lot clogging up the screen – albeit on Channel 5 – for 3 weeks, it really only leaves one thing to say. Isn’t it a bit of a misdescription to call the show Celebrity Big Brother?

I mean I like crap TV as much as the next, but..

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what you can do with a pile of sand

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Here’s a little gem from youtube that’s well worth 8 minutes of your time. I’d even go so far as to say I guarantee you’ll also end up watching it more than once… and utter the word ‘Wow’ at least half a dozen times.

The video shows the winner of 2009′s ” Ukraine ‘s Got Talent “, Kseniya Simonova. Her ‘talent’ – drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table – is incredibly mesmeric to watch, as the continuous flow of images tell the rather emotional story of how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky – then war planes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying – then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos, from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

During The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, one in four of the population was killed, with 8 to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million. Little wonder then, that so many in the audience were moved to tears and this incredible artist went on to win the top prize of about $ 75,000.

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Click on the picture below to watch this truly amazing performance..

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Who has the most talent?

Stop the press, hold the headlines, refresh your browsers. Susan Boyle wasn’t crowned the ‘Britains Got Talent’ winner after all.

Talk about the results not living up to the worldwide hype, or the bookmakers expectations. Despite being the favourite to sing her way to victory, the crown was whipped away from Ms Boyle and handed over to Diversity, a group of 11 incredible dancers from Essesx, aged between 12 and 25.

So why didn’t she win? Maybe the viewers, all 18.5 million of them, felt she had already achieved her place in the spotlight, and others now deserved a shot at fame more. Maybe people assumed she has her money making future in the bag, and no longer needed the prize. Or maybe people just thought the dancers were better.

Now I haven’t been watching the show, but I would have to have been blind, deaf and half way up a mountain not to have heard about the singing sensation that is Susan Boyle. I, along with some 220 million other people, watched her on YouTube back in April, when she first performed “I Dreamed a Dream”, from the musical “Les Miserables”. The video clip flooded our screens and filled inboxes everywhere. And I, along with everyone else, including the open-mouthed judging panel, sat and went – ‘Wow, that came out of that’.

Since then, she seems to have become something of the singing equivalent to Marmite – with her legion of adoring fans on one side, including Oprah Winfrey, Demi Moore and Jon Bon Jovi, and those who couldn’t wait to knock her down on the other. And there goes the fickle fame of fame, and the double edged sword of celebrity. Apparently, some people really don’t like to see a frumpy, middle aged church volunteer do well.

People’s obsession with ‘looking the part’ aside, what seems to me to be the most absurd, and probably saddest part of this whole singing circus, is that the day after losing the competition, Boyle checked herself into The Priory suffering from ‘exhaustion’. Isn’t The Priory the place that all those poor coked up celebrities crawl to, when they simply can’t deal with their charmed life and the negative press anymore?

Surely things can’t be that bad? Surely she can’t have got so bad in just a couple of months that she really feels the need for an ambulance and the assessment of the Mental Health Act – just to reconfirm that she’s tired and stressed? Why not just lock the door, take the phone of the hook and sit down with a nice cup of tea.

All this fame and glory must be a terrible thing to have to endure, it certainly never seems to make anyone happy. Oh well, she may not have won the competition, but at least she has the wealth still to come, with a reported eight million pounds up for grabs in the next year alone, from a record deal, book deal and possible film.

That should cheer her up a bit. It nothing else it will help towards the big black sunglasses, army of bodyguards and weekly sessions on the shrinks couch that she will certainly be needing, when the reality of her new life really kicks in.

I have to say, I was amazed that Susan Boyle didn’t win. Then I watched the clips below, and I could see why. She is without question a brilliant singer, but those dancers, they were just amazing.

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Watch Susan Boyle’s FINAL performance.

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Watch Diversity’s FINAL performance.

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