This week I'm worrying about my privacy.  

Admittedly, the cupboard is pretty bare.  I'm not involved in any affairs and there are none in my past.  Not that anyone - other than my husband and immediate family - would care much if I had been playing away from home.  It's hardly going to make the front page of the News of the World, is it...  Lorraine who?

But we live in an increasingly salacious world.  Nowadays news in the Red Tops focuses almost entirely on the concept of celebrity.  The lives of celebs are examined in microscopic detail and any juicy titbits from their private lives are exposed, exaggerated and paraded before us.

 Actually, what people get up to in their private lives is none of our damned business.

The concentration on the private lives of celebrities is unhealthy.  It is unhealthy for the celebrities (who are real people with feelings and emotions just like the rest of us) because of the constant intrusion required to bring us the stories of who's having an affair with whom.  A List celebs can't go anywhere or do anything without being followed by the press. 

Did we really learn nothing at all from the sordid media frenzy that was woven through the circumstances around the death of the Princess of Wales?

And it's unhealthy for us because it encourages us to live in an unreal, fantasy world where sex is king. 

 Hang on a minute, you may say.  Sex is only king because these celebs are at it all the time.  But, of course, they're not.  Celeb curls up on sofa with family to watch TV is not the stuff of which newspaper headlines are made. 

The press carefully filter and select the most salacious bits from thousands of lives.  In so doing they give us and - in my view - particularly impressionable young people, the idea that sexual shenanigans are far more common than they actually are.  They sift through lives to find the most extreme behaviour and then they normalise it.

 There are those who believe that, by choosing to become celebs, people forfeit all rights to privacy. 

 But few choose celebrity for its own sake.  They happen to be extremely good at football, for example, or they develop a talent for acting or singing.  The fact that they get to the top of the tree in these pursuits, rather than becoming very good teachers, nurses or electricians shouldn't affect their right to have private lives.   

And there are many who are thrust into celebrity status without doing anything whatsoever to court it.  The Duchess of Cambridge's sister, Pippa Middleton, is a case in point.  Kate could have avoided celebrity by refusing to have anything to do with Prince William.  Pippa could not.

 But the craziest rationale of all surfaced when it emerged that Sir Fred Goodwin, who led the Royal Bank of Scotland to disaster, had an affair with one of his senior executives.  It was in the public interest to know about this affair, we were told, because it could have affected Sir Fred's judgement.

 Well hang on a minute here.  A million and one things can affect someone's judgement.  It can affect your judgement if someone close to you is diagnosed with a serious illness.  Does this mean that there should be no medical confidentiality for people who are close to celebrities?  It can affect your judgement if your teenager is giving you grief.  Does this mean that the teenage children of celebs are fair game?

 In the race to make the biggest profits out of individual misfortune, it's easy to see how this escalated to the point at which the phones of (probably) thousands of people were being illegally tapped.

 Seriously, this has to stop.  At the moment anyone rich enough can go to court and get an interdict (or injunction in England) to prevent publication of personal information.  This can cost between £20,000 and £50,000; some say up to £100,000.

 The boot should be on the other foot.  Privacy should be maintained unless it can be proven that there is a real and clear public interest in the information being available.