When I was growing up, I didn't realise my mum was the coolest, wittiest, most interesting woman I'd ever meet in all my gorgeous life. From the age of 12, I tried to avoid her as much as possible, feeling in some way that identifying with her too closely would rob me of all my sad little ambitions - to live in London, take drugs with pop stars and make it into Who's Who.
Only once a week, regular as clockwork, did I find my mother's company desirable. That was at 11 sharp on a Saturday morning when, the paid working week done and the housework completed, she would go out into the backyard, whatever the weather, and wait by the left-hand fence for her neighbour, Lily.
In a low, hypnotic murmur, the two of them would commence a complete rundown on the week's sexual and emotional shenanigans in our street, soon to be joined by Millie, who would vault spryly over the wall into Lily's garden, and Jo, who would jump over into ours. The four of them stood there for a solid hour, and during this time I would use any excuse to wander out into the garden and ingratiate myself with my mother. But she wouldn't have any of it.
The minute I strolled out, the murmuring stopped and four irate faces glared at me. Only tempting tell-tale titbits lingered in the air: "living in sin", "a black man!" and once, memorably, "living in sin with a black man!".
My father disapproved of these sessions and, as he never voiced disapproval of anything my mother did, I knew that this was powerful stuff. Since that time I've been addicted to gossip, and seen it as not just a source of deep joy and spiteful fun but also as a weapon against all the pofaced politicos who love to lecture us about how "issues matter, not personalities".
The only bad thing about moving up the social scale is that your house isn't joined to anyone else's anymore, and you don't know your neighbours anyway.
This is where the Internet comes in. No matter how hard Tony Blair may try to convince us it's a white-hot tool of information technology guaranteed to move us all into the knowledge-hungry middle class, its main function has been to reduce/ elevate all of us to the status of ceaselessly gossiping old biddies slinging innuendo, half-truths and downright malicious lies across the worldwide electronic fence - and all on the boss's time, too!
When the Great Crash of 2002 finally happens, it will be less to do with the collapse of confidence in the economy than the simple fact that, thanks to the Internet, most people now spend most of their working hours gossiping.
It's lovely, terrible logic when you think about it; the eternal feminine value of human-interest storytelling corrupting, weakening and finally destroying the male conceit of dry, cold capitalism.
I dread to think how little work was being done on both sides of the Atlantic this week as the news broke of the end of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman's 11-year marriage. All across the world fans were reaching out to dry each others' tears and give testimony to The God That Failed: "I'm incredibly shocked and upset"; "Can't stop crying since I heard about it"; "They were the happiest couple in Hollywood!"; "Don't think I can face work today - but don't have net at home, so won't be able to chat! So must go in".
Over on the PopBitch website, meanwhile, where sour film and muse-biz has-beens and wannabes gather to mock and malign their hated idols, the tone was much less devastated. Stories, obviously untrue, came thick and fast: the time when one particularly strained dinner ended with Kidman flouncing to the desk and shouting: "I'll have the check, and he'll have that guy at the table by the toilets"; the one about how Kidman had signed a 10-year contract guaranteeing her an A-list career if she acted as "beard" to the sexually flexible Cruise; and a few others that could not be repeated in this newspaper.
WHY are we so shocked and so fascinated by the end of just another showbiz marriage? Let's face it, when it comes to sex, actors are a breed apart; the phrase DCOL (Doesn't count on location) doesn't exist in any other profession.
It's not even that actors are inherently slacker than the rest of us; it's just that their lives are essentially one long Temptation Island, during which they will be paid huge amounts of money to simulate sex and - even more lethal for a breed who can so easily mistake pretend-life for real - love, with a non-stop parade of the most attractive people in the world.
How many of us can honestly say that we could keep our hearts in cold storage with a naked Famke Janssen or Josh Hartnett crawling all over us? The wonder is not that film stars get divorced so much, but that any of them bother getting married at all. Why keep a steak at home when you've got a smorgasbord on location?
Nevertheless, because we're spoony old things at heart, we like to believe some showbiz marriages are different. These become our touchstone romances; proof that if a golden couple can resist all the temptations that the high life can throw at them, then surely we - who, let's face it, aren't very likely to be called upon to French kiss Angelina Jolie in the course of a day's work - can make ourselves stay on the straight and narrow.
And we do, despite our sophistication, think we can differentiate between "good" couples and "bad" couples. No one expects Liam and Nicole to grow old together - or even to exchange presents at Christmas. But we expected it, for some reason, of Meg and Noel. And of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin.
If we were wrong about them, what else were we wrong about? If a man can go off Kim Basinger, who's safe? Part of us panics petulantly, as though a favourite toy has been snatched away. And Tom and Nicole did seem. . . different. Why? Well, they lived over here in England for a few months, basically.
The way that we forgave the Cruise-Kidmans anything - their weird "religion", their nasty habit of making staff liable for huge fines if a word about their private lives got out, their frankly sick-making films - just because they lodged in dear old Blighty for a few weeks, is one of the sadder aspects of the whole affair.
It just goes to demonstrate how low our national self-esteem has fallen if the fact that a famous Yank takes a few dumps into our sewer system has us wetting ourselves with joy. That they've deigned to leave America the Beautiful for five minutes. They take their kids to the park! He went to Blockbuster to get a video out! - our joy in being used briefly by famous Americans is truly tragic to behold.
BUT the other part of us - the nasty, honest part - is secretly glad they've gone the way of all flesh, just as we were glad about Cindy and Richard, Ken and Em, Dawn and Lenny. Smug bastards! - filthy rich, gorgeous, successful and happily married.
Stars are meant to be lonely at the top, like Marilyn, Judy and James Dean; it's yer Faustian pact, innit? Come on - wasn't there always something a bit fishy about the Cruises? Especially when they tried to sex up their ailing union by making us all witness their alleged chemistry in Eyes Wide Shut, which backfired somewhat when Kidman, during her big love scenes with her husband, displayed all the transfixed lust of a woman trying to remember if this is the day the dry cleaning can be picked up.
And offscreen they were just as non-incendiary. Like Diana and Charles, there always seemed to be three people in the marriage - Tom, Nic and the camera.
Look at them turning up at premieres - she kisses him while he smiles for the camera, then vice-versa. They never seemed connected, private even in public, as obviously authentic lovers such as Zoe Ball and Norman Cook frequently do.
The professional gossips are now weighing in with their wild, well-paid guesses; he's got another bird, she doesn't want to bring up their adopted children as Scientologists, she's jealous of his career.
Whatever, their publicity machine has already trotted out the three great lies of modern divorce: it was pressure of work, it's an amicable break and there's no one else involved. In other words, they found that they both preferred being at work to being at home, the lawyers aren't involved yet and in six months time she'll be pregnant by some new kid on the block while he'll be all hooked up with some fresh-faced young beauty who really, really wants it.
That's showbiz.
