Even Beautiful people break up

And breathe.Christmas, New Year’s and all the emotional nail bombs that it brings has finally slammed the door and will not be back for another eleven months. The festive season promises so much, a chance to reconnect with your beloved, neglected family, quality time alone with the real you and an escape from the rat race. Instead it turns out your family don’t really miss you that much, the real you involves a lot more staring dead eyed at Living TV, absentmindedly shoving fistfuls of Quality Street into your dribbling, slackened jaw than you realised and compared to the tension in your parent’s house by December the 28th, the rat race, is a gentle frolic with Disney mice on valium. It’s over, breathe, you survived. It wasn’t always like that. Christmas used to be about presents and Santy and Grannys. Now, in my late twenties, it all seems a little hollow and sad. Everything is the same, the Christmas tree, the decorations, the same rituals of morning mass and Christmas dinner, but the things and the people who made it really magic have quietly gone. It’s amazing how quickly you fit into your childhood family role. By Christmas afternoon I was fighting with my big sister over washing up and by Stephen’s Day, I hated everyone, simply everyone. All we needed was Zig and Zag and our trip to the early nineties would have been complete. But now the sobering winds of January are blowing and with them news of celebrity breaks ups. Samantha Ronson and Lynsey Lohan are no more, J-Lo and her Costa Rican music man ( I’m sorry, I cannot remember his name..) are rumoured to be entering Splitsville and it seems the whole of celebrity Kingdom is sobering up, pulling the duvet over their bleary eyes and wondering what the hell they were thinking.Cheer up my skinny friends! There’s nothing like getting your heart ran over to make you feel how much you are suddenly part of the rich tapestry of human life; your heartache but a little thread in the great sumptuous knot of romantic disappointment. You can smile knowingly while leafing through say, WB Yeats in Waterstones, knowing that he is probably the only one who understands what you are going through. Or maybe lean by the odd rain splattered window, gazing soulfully against the misted glass thinking, yes, Kate Winslet would definitely play me in this scene.Because celebrities know pain and break up. Morgan Freeman is divorcing his wife after twenty four years of marriage. Twenty four smackaroos! Call me lazy but, well Morgan at seventy one isn’t exactly in the first giggle of girlhood, I think after all those years I’d have to become physically allergic to someone, they’d have to have murdered someone right in front of my eyes and someone I really liked, before I could be bothered with legal separation. I would just think, sod it, realistically one of us will be dead soon any way, let’s just wait it out.Even Hugh Hefner has split with his number one playmate Holly Madison due his inability at three hundred years of age to father a child with her. What makes this story so intriguing is that the Heff has already begun interviews to find Holly’s replacement. What would such an interview entail? Would you need to supply a, ahem, suitable CV? Would references be necessary? I demand to know.My saddest break up off the year is an obscure one, the tragic schism between “Transformers” star Megan Fox and “Beverley Hills 90210” superstar Brian Green. It was like A Star is Born for The OC Generation- a washed up TV star of the nineties finds love with a young wannabe actress, who eventually becomes the hottest new star in Hollywood. Briefly it was as if Angelina Jolie was dating Saved by The Bell’s Screech. Work pressure was the malignant force blamed. The old rat race that persuades that success means a powerful job or a bigger car not an arm to sleep under at night. Poor old Brian had to go.It’s hard to know if love is even possible anymore or like Christmas it’s just a pageant you play out in memory of happier times. I miss my Grannies most at that time of the year. Grannies know you from the get go but without the painful intimacy of being your parents, so they are free to see you as you really are. If they know you at seven, they know your soul for the rest of your life, because you don’t really change, not in any way that’s important anyway. They can look at you and say exactly what’s wrong, and they’ve summed up every problem you’re ever going to have into a softly spoken aside and love you for it. Who will ever love you like that again? It’s like stories you hear at Christmastime about when you were little, that make you laugh, but not in a ha ha ha way- in the way you feel when you’re being tickled, when laughing feels like crying.Happy New Year!