I was talking to somebody very famous the other day.
There are very few modern day ‘celebs’ from the weird world of the soap operas that I recognise let alone worship.
These days, when I am working with them and learn their name I Google them to see how important they might be. I’d be lost without Google on my lovely Android phone helping me appear to be brighter than I am.
So. There I was just sitting outside with the smokers in the huge ashtray that surrounds any door into a building, chatting to this fella who’d been on the telly for many years, not knowing that he’d been on the telly for many years. As is usually the case with famous people we weren’t talking about ‘the business’ but about, well, the Higgs Boson and the whole quantum physics malarkey.
When I say that’s what we were talking about, I of course mean that’s what we were guessing and speculating about. We knew not an awful lot about quantum physics between us and so were mutually and knowingly aiding and abetting each other’s speculation, neither knowing if we were arriving at some eureka moment or if we were collectively just talking bollocks. I think we were all talking bollocks but felt we’d cracked it and had no fear if Professor Brian Cox was to turn the corner. We were ready to engage with the Cox at his level of understanding.
However, it wasn’t the Cox that turned the corner at that exact moment, but what can only be described as ‘this raving mad woman’. She instantly spied the ‘celeb’ among us and let out this scary high-pitched noise. She rushed towards him, arms opened wide as if to enter into that embrace that only lovers enter into. Saliva dribbled down her chin and the sweat stains from her armpits seemed more than freshly moist.
For a moment I assumed they knew each other, then, from the look of complete horror on his face, I realised it was her intent to actually eat him.
He managed to deflect her and hold her at his arms length as she trembled and squealed at his touch.
She was a ‘fan’.
She knew his work intimately and therefore knew where he was, and had stalked him right to the very spot, half a metre away from me.
She excitedly told him all about himself. She kept holding her hand over her mouth and saying, “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.”
For his part, the ‘celeb’ concerned handled her really well.
He feigned interest in her, asked her how far she’d come, and asked if he could sign anything for her (she chose her arm and a photo of him from a magazine) and pose for a photo.
It fell to me to take her Blackberry phone from her and he duly put his arm around her and pushed his head against her cheek as they posed. I took a couple of photos on her phone, and then just as I handed it back, and the unnamed ‘celeb’ released his grasp of her she wet herself.
She didn’t wet herself discretely, but it was like waters being broken. The wee thundered to the ground from under her long dress, making us leap back to avoid the splashes.
She was extremely embarrassed of course. As if with one voice, everybody else that was there did that, “Not to worry. No problem. These things happen. You ok?” chorus that people do when things have become very awkward and the opposite of all the phrases of comfort is actually true.
She backed away and said she’d better go, and after a lingering pause or two to tell the ‘celeb’ more about himself, and a lot of waving, she disappeared.
Well, the silence that filled the gap she’d left was full of ‘Errr’ and ‘O-k-a-y’ and, most annoyingly, we forgot totally about the Higgs Boson.
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