2 1GT Friday August 7 2020 | the times
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Orlando Bloom
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In this week’s Globe
Angelina Jolie is
called to account
for the noise levels
pumped out by
her six locked-
down children.
“NEIGHBOURS
RAGE AT ANGIE’S
CRAZY KIDS,”
the headline
roars, claiming
that Jolie is “the
neighbour from
Hell-ywood” for
letting her “brood”
“run wild” in a
manner that is
driving “wealthy
locals” “batty”.
“Noise travels,
and they’re cranking
up the music at
night and shouting,
laughing and having
a great time,” a
“source” said, in
a sentence that
inadvertently makes
the Jolie family look
ace. “The kids are
splashing around in the
pool and howling with
delight,” the “source” continued.
Jolie’s Los Angeles house is set in
two acres of gardens, with the
nearest neighbour a ten-minute walk
away. My seven siblings and I lived in
a semi on an estate, and we had the
game “Screaming”, in which we
would simply scream for as long and
as loud as we could. If our father was
feeling “in a parenting mood” he
would invite us to sit on the bonnet
of the Datsun, while he drove down
the road at 17mph pumping out
Cream’s I Feel Free on the stereo.
What I’m saying is, the neighbours
could do with a bit of perspective.Until this week there were several
contenders for the primary fact we
know about the Hollywood actor
Orlando Bloom. That he is engaged
to Katy Perry. That he was once
papped paddleboarding naked. That,
after the Daily Mail wrote something
disparaging about him, his mother
sent his CV to the paper to prove
that he had nine GCSES.
But this week a new Bloom fact
presented itself to the world. In an
otherwise innocuous feature in
OK! about celebrities and their pets
the magazine revealed that, upon the
death of his beloved dog, Sidi, in 2016,
Bloom had his skeleton mounted in
the front room so that he could
continue to say goodnight to him.
While this is, obviously, a touching
if slightly bizarre tribute to how much
Bloom loved his dog, it does make
problematic his future options re
getting another. Surely any new
Teddy, Buddy or Max would just...
eat Sidi? Or bury him, piece by piece,
in the garden, as nature intended?
Bloom has basically invented an
incredibly effective closed system of
dog recycling, and I hope it is this,
rather than his willy on a paddleboard,
that we eventually remember him for,
for it is a remarkable achievement.Quote of the
Week, and
everyone’s favourite
dirty grandma, Miriam
Margolyes, refused to
stick to the customary
“getting older is a
blessing” homilies.
“You’re turning 80 next year —
how do you feel about getting
older?” OK! asked her. “I think it’s
absolutely f***ing awful,” she replied.
We all have long-term ambitions,
be they yachts, Oscars or finding a
pair of jeans that doesn’t make your
arse look weird. It’s good to have
something to aim for.
My personal long-term ambition
is to be able to own enough
suitable land to facilitate the local
reintroduction of beavers, the
buck-toothed mammals whose
dam-building skills mean they could
legitimately take part in a classic
episode of Grand Designs. I would
love to see Kevin McCloud doing
his pre-second-ad-break “doubtful”
monologue to camera — “These
beavers have soaring ambitions
when it comes to damming this
river. But this time, I wonder, have
they bitten off more than they can
chew?” — before having to eat
humble pie in his final monologue:
“I must admit, I had my doubts.
But plucky Mr and Mrs Beaver have
erected this 3m lodge overnight,
and within their budget of zero
pence. They have made not their
‘for ever’ home, but their ‘for beaver’
home, and that, in the end, is what
architecture is all about, isn’t it?”
To this minutely planned end,
then, I was this week peeved to see
that Bodmin Moor has just had a
Eurasian beaver reintroduced to its
rivers, taking the British population
up to about 400. Why the
peevement? Because the locals have
named the animal Sigourney.
Sigourney Beaver. That was what
I was going to call my beaver. Now
it’s all ruined. I’m going to have to
scrap my beaver plan and fall back
on plan B: getting some land that
I can reintroduce horned ungulates
to, in the shape of Moose Willis.
Why must everything be so difficult?Romantic relationships are odd.
However much we might think we
know about other people’s, they are,
at their core, mysterious to everyone
save the two people involved. There’s
so much we can’t see. So much we
can’t understand.
All that said, every so often the
outside observer can fairly confidently
call out the odds on a couple lasting
the course or not, based on what we
might loosely term “general vibes”.
And so to an interview with
Max George, formerly of the
boyband the Wanted, and
his girlfriend, Stacey Giggs.
Asked if he intended to
marry his new partner,
George replied: “She’d
have to say yes first. We
seem to be getting on
all right. She keeps her
emotions to herself —
I love that about her.”
So he’s thinking about
proposing, but doesn’t seem
at all sure that she’d say yes,
assessed the relationship as
merely “all right” and has a
partner who has buried all her
emotions deep in her stomach
in a ticking time bomb of
unexamined feeling. If I ran a
marquee hire firm, I don’t think
I’d pop a flyer through their door
any time soon. Still — good luck!Another week,
another lost headline
opportunity, this
one concerning
the planning
permission joy of
David and Victoria
Beckham, née Posh,
at their Cotswolds
home. Described as
“a drama” by Heat
magazine, the incident
involved their plan to
install a “kidney-shaped
lake” at their country
house after locals
dubbed it “ugly” and
mounted a battle against it.
Quite how a lake can be “ugly”
is an interesting point — it’s just
some water. Is water ugly?
Anyway, this is all neither here nor
there, for the locals’ campaign failed
and the Beckhams will get their lake.
The main problem is that not a single
media organisation covering this story
headlined it: “Kidney: failure.”Now best known
for playing the
titular role in
Captain Marvel, the
actress Brie Larson
once auditioned
for another sci-fi
movie you may
have heard of.
“Stars Wars...
Yeah, I auditioned for
that. Didn’t get it,”
she recalled on her
new YouTube
channel last month.
Alighting on the
whimsy potential,
I wonder which role
Brie auditioned for,
given that “Brie Larson”
already sounds like a
Star Wars character’s
name. Princess
Dairyleia? Boba Feta?
R2-Fondue? Quark
Vader? Yes, I will stop
now. Kylo Rennet.Caitlin
Moran
Celebrity Watch
UP
Miriam
Margolyes
UP
Beavers
DOWN
Max George
UP
The
Beckhams
DOWN
Leonardo
DiCaprio
and Camila
Morrone
UP
Brie
Larson
UP
Angelina Jolie
The American Star magazine
has published a paparazzi shot
of the Hollywood luminary Leonardo
DiCaprio and his customary 23-year-
old model girlfriend — this one is
called “Camila” — out and about. Why
is this picture in the magazine?
“LEO & CAMILA EXPECTING?”
the headline asked, prompted because
in the photo Camila has “what appears
to be a budding baby bump” and
is “looking noticeably rounder
across the middle”.
Why was the magazine so confident
that she is pregnant?
“She and Leo smile at each other
like they’ve got a secret,” it claimed,
confidently. Could it be that this
“secret” was simply “remembering
a large lunch”? I guess we’ll find
out in nine months or so.6
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long term ambitions
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