Why celebrity crushes are INCREDIBLE.

Ah, the old celebrity crush...the refuge of those who realise that their partners have feet of clay/that there are no eligible men within a fifty-mile radius/who are bored out of their minds.  As a confirmed singleton of the last three years, let me state for the record that celebrity crushes have kept me sane in an otherwise insane world.  "Pah!" I hear you cry, "you are pathetic!" I put it to you that I am not, and that you're probably nursing a big ol' celeb crush yourself, if you're going to be entirely honest. Go on, let yourself think about him/her. It's only the two of us, and once I tell you what I'm about to tell you, you'll understand why I will never, ever judge you. Even if you end up in a bush outside their house, in the rain, with an oversize mac on and a ghetto blaster, a la John Cusack in Say Anything.

Caitlin Moran said in "How To Be A Woman" that she had a crush so profound, so exquisite, and so tangible, on a comedian that she genuinely felt like he was an ex, and that her friends had to pull her away from approaching him when she finally saw him in the flesh, because he actually did not know her from Adam, and they had never gone out, which confused her. Ahaha. Ha. Ha haaa ha. That is chickenfeed, people. I see her confusion, and I raise her. I can beat that hands down. Because I know, for a fact, that Gary Oldman is actually my ex-husband and by rights, should be paying me alimony.

I've always had crushes. When I was a tiny tot in England, I had a crush on Noel Edmonds from "Saturday Swap Shop", which meant that I wanted him to hold my hand and give me sweeties (and roast beef flavoured Monster Munch, so good you'd be licking the MSG off your fingers for hours afterwards) and just look after me, in general. There was...oh, let me see...Philip Schofield from The Broom Closet, on BBC, when we moved back to Ireland...mostly because he showed Ulysses 31 and I still love that damn cartoon. Setting Homer's The Odyssey in space? With a rather hot Ulysses to boot? How could I not have loved Philip Schofield? Then there was Midge Ure, when I first saw the video to "Vienna", then when I was twelve, it was Bruce Willis because of "Moonlighting", and from 13 to 17, it's a blur. A blur, because when I was 17, Bram Stoker's Dracula was released and from the moment I saw the first ad for it, BOOM. Time stopped. Everything stopped. From the first moment I saw Gary Oldman in that beautiful blue suit, with the top hat and the weirdy sunglasses, I knew what a pure and untouchable, white-hot furnace lust really was.

1992 was a far more technologically innocent time.  It was over 20 years ago. No mobiles, no youtube, no easy access to the object of your desire via the internet; oh no, we were old school. If you fancied an actor, you went to the cinema to see his films. If you fancied a singer, you watched Top of the Pops or watched MTV if you could get it. You were on a starvation diet, where you scanned every single film magazine or gossip magazine or newspaper to glean even the teeniest scrap of information on him to consume hungrily, ravenously, ingesting it until it became part of you. It was wonderful. The anticipation, the frisson of longing and need, all in the days before I had actually had sex (and even then, it was a while before the good stuff really started to happen) and I could project all of my yearning onto poor old Gary Oldman. I arranged a group of us to go to the cinema from school, I had stuck pictures of the film all over my school notebook, I was already a complete nerd about it, and all way before it came to my provincial Irish town. I already knew that gothic horror "did it" for me, the Victorian stuff especially. No great surprises there. But oh my...the night I finally saw the film, I could not breathe. I fell so ridiculously, so hopelessly in love with that man I could have pulled the head off that vanilla milksop of a Mina, Winona Ryder. I blazed in fury during that scene where they both pet the white wolf, at the cinematograph, when Dracula nearly seduces her. NEARLY!!! What the fuck was wrong with the frigid beach?? I totally supported Lucy and her descent into the unholy, I cried when Dracula got killed, tried to ignore Keanu Reeves'...well, Keanu Reeves, to be honest. Jesus, that film could have been so much better without that tree in a lead role. Or Winona Ryder. Or a bit less self-indulgence...but I digress.

Long after the credits had rolled, my crush stayed in place. To call it a crush is to liken an Aston Martin DB5 to a Toyota Yaris, in that they are both four-wheeled vehicles. Everything, everything was about him. Everything. I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, State of Grace, Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, anything with him in it that I could get my hands on. It is still the longest and most pernicious crush I've ever had on someone I didn't know and will never meet. He was a demon - I can still remember the trajectory of our relationship like it was yesterday.  Our eyes locked across a crowded bar in London, and that's all she wrote. We were together all the time, and the night we met, we ran up rain-soaked streets in London with The Bangles' cover of Hazy Shade of Winter playing in the background. Oh, we were that epic - he pushed me into a doorway and kissed my face off. He almost stripped me right then and there, and of course, in the montage of our first meeting, cut to scene of a huge bed, no sheets, and a massive plate glass window behind us, full on night sky, very much like the scene in Highlander when they finally get it on. (How come no one ever notices the seriously unintenional comedy scene-splicing to the lion roaring during that lovemaking scene? Still cracks me up.) Gary Oldman was mad about me. He punched a guy at a party for daring to talk to me. He got angry with other women for chatting him up.  You know, all the stuff in an imaginary relationship that means that he is nuts about you, and the stuff that, if it happened in real life, there would be a you-shaped hole in the door as you ran screaming into the night away from the controlling freak you ended up with.

Of course, we broke up. Pretty much around the time when I met my first real boyfriend and Gary got forgotten about. I still supported him, that man I married in my head and had to leave for earnest, heart-felt reasons - not least being that he was a figment of my imagination. I went to see Leon and had the strength of character to admit that he was good. I could look over the fact that we were only recently divorced. But time moves on, and years fly by, and before I knew it, last year I went to Red Riding Hood (terrible) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (brilliant) and I'm glad to say that Gary Oldman was the best thing in both. The former I would expect, but the latter is quite a feat; John Hurt, to my mind, is our greatest living actor and Gary Oldman stole the show. So much so, that as I watched him, I heard Barbra Streisand singing The Way We Were in my head, and I felt ridiculously proud of him, as if he was actually, in real life, my ex-husband and all the hurt was finally over. I felt like he watched me grow from a girl into a woman and all that crazy ass crap, until I realised something very important - if I ever meet him, it will be the first time we've ever met, and there will be no silent, wistful gazes. We actually do not know each other. And that feels wrong. I'm serious. It feels wrong to me.

Gary passed the baton to Benedict Cumberbatch in Tinker Tailor. The first husband gave the green light to the potential second; within the first five minutes of the BBC series Sherlock, I could not believe the thoughts I was having about the paedophilic horror from Atonement. So we embarked on a relationship full of cultural pursuits and piss-ups, in which I repeatedly made him do his infamous impersonation of Alan Rickman. This is actually real, you can google it. Benedict Cumberbatch can do Alan Rickman singing Candle in the Wind. Brilliant. He took me to Paris, we lived in the British Museum, the best hotels, the best sex, the best conversation...the most smug, became quite boring, realised over time that he really is an odd-looking bloke and that maybe it's Sherlock Holmes who's really sexy, not him...then over Christmas I finally discovered The Mighty Boosh. Goodbye, Benedict Cumberbatch, hello, Noel Fielding.

Ah, my cheeky otter, of absurdist humour and startlingly erotic Kate Bush performances (google, it's so worth it), so ridiculously handsome and so right up my street...70s glam, perky goth, vivid blue eyes, looks incredible in girl's clothes, his voice is like sexualised melted white chocolate with a curly-wurly thrown in...we rolled out of every bar in Camden while I wore Victorian gothic clothes and he looked like Marc Bolan. Whereas Cumberbatch and I went to the opera, the ballet, dinner, all the stuff I love, Fielding and I snogged for hours by Cleopatra's Needle. Rolled around Camden and Shoreditch at all hours, hooting and laughing, crashed parties, danced like lunatics, stayed in bed for days - we were rock and roll, all the way. It lasted until my friend Neil told me to shut the fuck up about him. Pop! Bang goes the imaginary relationship. I don't mind; in the last year, I've gone out with Benedict Cumberbatch and Noel Fielding, and truth be told, I need a break. Need to refuel the batteries and take a breather.

The thing is, crushes serve to keep our flirting muscles flexed for when we meet someone really cute. If, in your head, you pulled a rake of famous men, it can make you a little less wary of chatting up real people, and can make you more amenable to being chatted up by them. As long as you remember that it's just a laugh, that you are not actually saving yourself for the object of your affection and truth be told, you wouldn't choose to be in their company for five minutes in the real world, you're grand. Crushes make you feel sexy and attractive when real attention or suitable distractions are thin on the ground, so indulge when the urge arises and enjoy it. Unless your a serious masochist, nobody ever gets hurt in the world of your sexual imagination - or needs precautions - so go for it!

Now where's my copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula?