Status anxiety

Be careful what you wish for — or, as the old proverb puts it, if God hates you, he grants your deepest wish. All my life I have wanted to be famous and now that I am finally enjoying my 15 minutes I am not sure it is all it is cracked up to be. I mistakenly thought that becoming a celebrity would be liberating — I would shrug off the everyday constraints of being a repressed, middle-class Englishman and get in touch with my inner egomaniac. In fact, the opposite is true. Since How to Lose Friends & Alienate People became the number one film at the British box office I have had to watch my ps and qs to a far greater extent than before.

For instance, if I am introduced to someone at a party, I cannot shake their hand and say ‘pleased to meet you’ just in case I have met them before. In the past, such an infraction would not have mattered. The injured party would have rightly put my forgetfulness down to the fact that I was drunk the last time we met. Now, because I am famous, they think I am pretending not to remember them on account of their ‘civilian’ status. The upshot is that whenever I am introduced to anyone I make a point of smiling warmly and saying ‘good to see you’ — a deliberately ambiguous greeting that leaves open the possibility that the person in question made a vivid impression on me first time round. If it turns out that I really have met them before, they then feel free to buttonhole me for the next 15 minutes. As Nancy Astor said, ‘The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.’