Stick with humans in future, Katie

NORMALLY you feel regret when couples break up.

This happens even when you don’t know them, which is weird. I mean, why would you care that Johnny Depp and his missus have parted company? It’s not like they’re due to pop over for pizza and a DVD anytime soon. Or that you’ll have to do that awful listening to them bitching about each other thing that some less evolved couples make their friends sit through when they’re breaking up. At least with Johnny and Vanessa, you won’t have to take sides.

And yet, you hear it on the internet, or see the fat black headlines in the newsagent, and you think — and this is involuntary, mind — you think, oh what a shame. They seemed so nice together too.

You start to worry about Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, as though breaking up is a contagion that’s spreading through long-term couples connected with cartoon-goth movies.

What’s really odd is that it happens even with couples to whom you have zero cultural connection — like Charlotte Church and the hair gel guy. Or Russell Brand and Katy Perry. You’re dreading the day when the papers tell you Brad and Angelina have split, even though it’s completely irrational. But still we react with an inner sigh, in a distant extension of what you feel when you hear your own friends are breaking up — a kind of fleeting feeling of regret that it didn’t work out for them. Unless, of course, it’s a friend who’s been stuck with someone horrid for ages, acting as their own jailer, refusing to let themselves out.

When my friend M finally left her hideous husband, all her women friends took her out for dinner to celebrate. I don’t think she realised how relieved we all were. We’d been holding our breath for ages.

It felt the same — just maybe less breath exhaled — when Katie Thingy left Tom Cruise. What a relief. Watching those two get together — even before anyone jumped up and down on Oprah’s sofa — was like watching a gazelle being lured into the diamond encrusted lair of a power-crazed gnome. Now she wants her soul back, as well as sole custody of the high-heel wearing six year old.

Phew. Run Katie run! We never did trust that Tom Cruise. How can you trust someone made of polyurethene? Tom is not of this earth, Katie. We don’t know where he’s from, but we’re glad you’ve made your escape. Stick with humans in future.