Fame is a very fickle mistress. Contrary to the lyrics of that drama-school film of 1980, she does not make you live forever. Warnings about the fickleness of Fame and Good Fortune have been given for millennia, by orators and philosophers from the Ancient Greeks onward. You’d think by now that Fame’s own reputation for impoverishing rather than enriching would have put people off wanting to achieve it. Yet it doesn’t. So is the fame that people seek really something else? Do they only want recognition of their existence? Is that desire a side-effect of living in large, anonymising communities where positive values like goodness, kindness or decency do not get the same attention as negative ones? If to be a legend in your own lunchtime is preferable to never having any fame at all, doing something stupid can look a pretty good deal.

I don’t know why anyone becomes classed as a celebrity. It’s such an empty word. To be famous for being famous sounds stupid, but it seems to happen. People whose talent is minuscule become famous not just locally but nationally and globally – globally meaning within the technologically broadcastable world. To be a celebrity you need to be young and/or attractive and/or prepared to say or do something outrageous; though in the case of politicians, who usually achieve fame by having started as a lawyer and taken a side road, I’d skip the first two criteria. Some of the scandals in Government make me wonder about the other half’s eyesight.

Fame can get it wrong. Reputation is not only who saw you and when, it’s what someone tells someone else that they said about you. It isn’t pleasant to be accosted (or emailed or phoned, or written about) then attacked for something you did or said so long ago that you’ve forgotten it, let alone for something you didn’t do. Look at Richard III. The sorrowful City of York, the day after the Battle of Bosworth in August 1485, wrote: “King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was … piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City ...” Yet, through successive centuries of play performance, Henry VII’s playwright has given Richard III a reputation that is a byword for evil. The only saving grace about this is that Richard is no longer around to be affected by it.

Whether or not you deserve fame, it usually comes accompanied by demands on your time and temper that are not compensated by the occasional boost to your ego. Fame is a drain. It doesn’t last long enough to bring money, it doesn’t enable you to avoid the things you don’t like doing, it doesn’t help you to thumb your nose indefinitely at the rest of the workaday world. None of us can stop the wheel of fortune long enough to really settle down into the lifestyle that fame holds tantalisingly before us. When celebrities thumb their noses, they do it as though they know that. It’s because they are famous that they just have to push the boundaries, or at the very least do those revolting forfeits like eating worms.

The best I can suggest is this: forget becoming famous. Celebrity is short and unrewarding. What you want to be is RICH.