Barbra Streisand made a shocking confession last week, says Giles Coren in The Times. The 81-year-old star told an interviewer: “I haven’t had much fun in my life.” This is the same Barbra Streisand who worked alongside Robert Redford and Omar Sharif, won countless awards, sold hundreds of millions of albums, played Las Vegas and married multiple “hunky film stars”. If she hasn’t had fun, who has? But she’s not alone. Pop star Robbie Williams says no one in the extreme fame game comes out of it “well-adjusted and happy and mentally well”. Even Monty Don – a “twinkly Oxbridge toff whose job is just pottering around the garden” – says he is leaving the “remorseless treadmill” of Gardeners’ World.
I think these guys might be on to something. What really brings Streisand joy, she says, is time spent with her family and dogs, and I couldn’t agree more. The standard definition of “fun” has always involved dancing, parties, festivals, fashion, fame, sex, and “brightly coloured plastic things” – none of which I enjoy, so I have always believed “I am not having a fun life myself”. But what the misery of these celebs shows me is “what enormous fun my own life really is”. Tomorrow, I will finish my book in bed with the cat in my lap, “hustle the family out for a walk”, watch my kids fall off their chairs laughing at the television, iron some shirts and be asleep by 10pm. “And I will never have had more fun in my life.”