Last updated 19:42, Thursday, 05 June 2008

I COULD feel my lips pursing as fast as if I’d been sucking on a lemon - and I realised how much I have changed and how judgemental I had become.

I remember back in the 60s or 70s when Richard Burton threw a lavish party to celebrate the birthday of his wife, Elizabeth Taylor.

I can’t remember the details but it reputedly cost £1 million and people were horrified at the wanton waste, when half the world was starving.

My view at the time was that we shouldn’t be so po-faced. If people had money, let them enjoy it; they were not hurting anyone else.

So why didn’t I feel the same way when I read that Brad Pitt had bought Angelina Jolie a $35 million chateau he’d spotted from the air when flying his helicopter?

I think I felt ill because I read the article in the same newspaper that reported that the price of food worldwide was soaring and the cost of rice was now unaffordable to many in Third World countries.

Perhaps I was irritated because countless column inches have been devoted to this couple and their quest to adopt a child, seemingly from every country in the world and what seems to be her intention to save the world.

But you are not saving the world by riding around in a helicopter or spending $35 million on a house.

You may have guessed, if you’ve ever read Talk of the Times before, that I get a little sick of Britain’s obsession with celebrity, but lately it has started to bother me even more.

We are the enlightened generation, or should be. We know what is happening in the world thanks to instant, electronic communications. In many ways, too, we have developed a global conscience. Even our governments now pay open lip service to the plight of the world’s starving. We protest and we boycott and we have maximum coverage on TV, radio and in the papers about the problems of the world and how we can help.

But we will never be able to help as long as the world is divided so sharply into the haves and have- nots - and we will never be able to help as long as the wrong people are the have-nots.

What sort of sick society do we live in where we spend more on warfare than we do on feeding the starving?

Where is the justice in a movie star being paid millions while an Aids doctor in Africa is struggling to find medication. Who is trying to rectify the crime of a child dying in pain, without morphine, while Brad Pitt spots houses from his helicopter?

How can we accept a world where spoilt footballers are the among the country’s wealthiest people? And how does this compare to the children in ragged clothes, ravaged by hunger, who spend hours making the footballs, stitching until their fingers bleed?

My high school education was in a convent boarding school where we were taught that Communism was the greatest threat to civilisation - the anti-Christ itself.

It is true enough that Communism, in the way it was practised, became a horrible thing. It was, and is, a regime based on fear and cruelty.

It occurred to me, when I was a teenager at school, that the two examples of Communism at its very best - where the common wealth was shared for the common good - was the example of Jesus and his disciples and the nuns themselves who lived in community.

When I suggested this during a Christian doctrine lesson I was hushed up, but I believe I was on to something there.

If we lived in a world where the wealth was shared around equally, we would live in paradise.

It is never going to happen, of course. Joe Bloggs next door will work hard while Fred does nothing. And Joe will become resentful and . . . well, you know the rest.

So my pure Communist world is never going to happen.

I guess I just have to be satisfied with the fact that when he is not riding around in a helicopter, Brad Pitt is helping kids somewhere in the world. I have to be satisfied that many, many stars and footballers etc. do give loads of their money to charities.

But I still wish they didn’t have to. I still wish the world was a fairer place.