You’re 51 years old. Be less interesting. You’ll enjoy evenings in, with your little daughter upstairs asleep
I do not doubt that I will one day be roused from a drunken stupor by the sound of a Las Vegas traffic cop tapping his baton on my car window, and turn to find a Sunset local of uncertain gender tidying itself hastily in the passenger seat next to me. That is why I have never written about Hugh Grant. It is always best to avoid moralising if one possibly, possibly can. Or avoid prostitutes. Ideally both.
Another reason that I have never written about Hugh Grant is in case I bump into him at a party (it hasn’t happened yet but I still keep hoping it will). I want to be able to bound up to him all gin-struck and sweaty and paw his lapel and say, “Hi, Richard, I just loooooved you in Withnail and I!” And not have him blank me dead because 12 years previously I wrote something mean about him. (All actors claim not to read about themselves in the press, but they’re ALL lying.) And finally, I have always cut him some slack on account of all the work he has done for posh people everywhere. By talking more or less like I do, stammering a bit and grinning inanely when forced to consort with poor people, he has made it much easier to be a dozy public school twonk at large in the community. Working-class people used to hate people like me. Pubs were rendered terrifying and I didn’t dare speak out loud at the football. The common man associated us with power and slavery and droit de seigneur. But now, because of Hugh, they think that we are harmless buffoons and seem to rather like us. It’s how David Cameron got elected. All because of Hugh. The people’s toff.
But he is now beginning to confuse me a bit. For no sooner does he finish doing the rounds of the party conferences on his anti-hacking and general privacy for celebrities who like a bit of slap and tickle ticket, than he whizzes off in his Ferrari, en route to a game of golf, to drop in briefly on a newborn child he has recently fathered by a woman he hardly knows called Tinglan Hong, who may or may not be an actress, then cops off with a stripper in Berlin whose age is much closer to his baby daughter’s than it is to his own, pops back to London for another half hour visit with the child, this time to the million-pound safe house in Fulham he has cunningly bought through a cousin, and declares that he has come back to “protect” his daughter — presumably from the villainous “media”.
Protect? Pull the other one, old bean. With a schedule like that you are positively begging to have your phone hacked. And hers. I would hack it myself. Sienna Miller would hack it. The Queen would hack it. It’s famous people carrying on like this that got the whole paparazzi/tabloid thing started in the first place. If you can’t see that then I’ve a good mind to take you to court and demand that you make all future telephone calls from the home of a journalist, with him there, listening and writing it all down. Ideally me. Then at least I could give you a word of advice.
Be less interesting. Drop the silly Italian car for impotent sleazebags. Drop the naff non-sport for pot-bellied child molesters. Avoid “burlesque artistes”. In fact, avoid all artistes (nothing good ever came of an artiste). Then marry this woman, Tinglan Hong, whether you consider her to have been a “fleeting affair” or not. Because siring a child on her and then bogging off back to Berlin is nothing to be proud or happy or protective about. That isn’t becoming a father. That is remaining a nothing.
You will have created a little girl with a multimillionaire absentee for one parent and a lonely foreign concubine holed up on guilt money in a strange town for the other. She’ll end up a cross between Petra Ecclestone and Oliver Twist: alone in the world and up to her ears in Louboutins. It’s a classic recipe to end up the sort of girl who shags old men she’s seen on the telly in the hope that people will notice her. Great fun to bump into at the Groucho, but not what you’d want for a daughter. Believe me.
Simply creating a person is no big deal. There is no shortage of people. So marry Tinglan, and give the child a home, not just a house. That would be the manly thing to do. She is no Liz Hurley, I dare say, but most men make do with a lot less. What are you afraid of? What are you looking for? How different do you think a relationship with the next bird is going to be? Or the next?
You’re 51 years old. Just marry her. She’s a woman like any other. You’ve got a kid now, so you wouldn’t be having sex much anyway. It’ll be no better or worse than most marriages. You’ll row a bit, find a couple of long-running telly shows in common and disagree on where your daughter goes to school. But at least there will be a conversation about it. Not just Tinglan sitting alone in her empty hideout in Fulham, leafing through brochures for the sorts of school she thinks that Hugh Grant’s daughter ought to go to, and then sending you the bill.
Marry her. It’s not so bad. You’ll still be able to go to the cinema maybe once a year, and go on holiday to nice hotels, as long as they take kids, and you can keep up with your old mates by phone. Though of course there will be no more boffing young chicks in nightclubs.
But you’ll start to enjoy staying in, knowing your daughter is upstairs asleep. You’ll look forward to In the Night Garden and then splash-splash time and putting her to bed. You’ll come downstairs and Tinglan will have made dinner, or maybe it’s your turn and you’ll go and get a curry instead, and the pair of you will watch three episodes of The Killing back to back and polish off a second bottle of burgundy, then wake up with a classic middle-class parent hangover. But then you’ll go upstairs to wake the kid, and the moment she opens her eyes and smiles at you, the world will be right again, just like that.
You’ll chop in the Ferrari for something with room in the back for a pushchair and ten thousand nappies. You’ll stop complaining about celebrity because you’ll have time to reflect on the fact that if it were not for Four Weddings you’d have ended up by now a bitter old English teacher in a rainy Northern private school, forever up in front of the beaks for French kissing sixth-form girls after play rehearsals. And you’ll be glad of the excuse to give up golf.
It’s all the life you will ever want for a while. And then after a few months you might feel like making another of your ropey old movies. But now each night after filming you’ll be home for splash-splash, and a baked potato in front of Downton.
And if at any time you get up and go to the window, and you tweak the curtain and peer outside, there will be nobody out there looking in. The paparazzi will be far, far away. And nobody will be hacking your phone.
And that is what you want. Isn’t it?
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