Soap Bubble

I sometimes wonder what I might have achieved if I hadn't wasted so much of my time thinking about the soap-opera existences of people I do not know - or perhaps that should be "the existences of people I do not know, whose lives I transform into soap opera in my head".

My most recent lapse has been the hours I have spent reading with embarrassing avidity everything that has appeared related to the announcement by Meghan Markle and the person formerly - and strictly speaking still, until April, I think (??) - known as Prince Harry - (and why did his parents choose to give him a shortened name anyway? Is that where his problems started? But I digress) - that they were going to "step back" from the duties that being a member of Britain's royal family entails.

I won't go into my particular take on that ongoing saga. Were I halfway sensible, I know I wouldn't even have a take, let alone allow my mind to be filled with speculative thoughts and theories about the episode and what its effect will be on the couple involved. 

But I am not halfway sensible and I have allowed myself to become intensely preoccupied with this story - and with countless other similar ones that have equally little bearing on my own life, beyond the curiosity they arouse in me. 

Perhaps it is my love of fiction that makes me so interested - the people involved are real, but I can view them as if they were characters in a - not very good - novel. I can speculate about their motives and about human behaviour in general, extrapolating from the tales of foolishness and emotional intemperance I read about them. And perhaps it is this process that Muriel Spark is trying to evoke when she has fiction and reality blurring in Loitering with Intent and other novels (it was a recurring theme or motif for her); perhaps her aim was to demonstrate that each individual's reality is really a fiction composed within their own minds, that no one is to another anything but a fiction.

Be that as it may, my fascination with the soap opera side of other people's lives started a long long time ago. I realised just how long ago recently, when I read in the newspaper, in the context of some kind of television dramatisation of the episode, that the Profumo Affair happened in 1963. Which means that my prurient interest in sensationalism goes all the way back to that year, even though I was only six years old at the time.

My family still lived in a street that ran between the King's Road and the Fulham Road in London then. If you turned left at the Fulham Road end, you very quickly arrived at what was still called St Stephen's Hospital, although it has since been robbed of its saintliness and renamed Chelsea & Westminster. 

My brother and I would pass that hospital regularly on our companionable wanderings around the city, and, despite being so young, in August 1963 I knew that there was something very exciting called the Profumo affair going on and that in St Stephen’s there lay a man called Stephen Ward* who was somehow involved in this Profumo thing and who had tried to kill himself - and I somehow got hold of the idea and have hung onto it ever since that he took deadly nightshade, which particularly fascinated me as there was a patch of deadly nightshade that I saw on walks at the place in the country where we spent our weekends. 

I passed the hospital most of the days that Ward lay there hovering between life and death, (have I got this right - I remember believing he was there for three or four days), and I think it must have been then that this awful taste for the melodramatic took hold of me. For, although it was the sixties already, it was not yet by any means "the Sixties". London, including Chelsea, was not yet swinging or particularly exciting. This strange scandal that was all the grown ups could talk about was a spark of fascinating mystery in a rather dull existence.

Since then there hasn't been a story of romance and drug taking, of high life and misery, of ambition smashed by peccadilloes that hasn’t instantly grabbed my attention and sent me off into days of fervent interest. I was/am capable of the kind of solid concentration when reading about such topics that I only dream of when knuckling down to sensible, constructive endeavours, tasks that need doing and so forth and so on. The truth is feverish fascination with the tawdry and trivial has, since 1963, been one of my  besetting sins.

Although I don't know anyone else who admits to a preoccupation with all this nonsense, I try to comfort myself that there must be others out there who do share my shameful passion, because all the newsprint expended on such subjects cannot be intended only for me.

If I am the lone audience though, I thank all gossip columnists, royal correspondents and other purveyors of pages of nonessential social speculation for their efforts. I consume every word with guilty joy.

*Stephen Ward is or was usually described as a "society osteopath", which always amused me, even as a small child.