Neil Mackay reflects on his own painful experience of how easily families fall apart, and why sometimes blood is not thicker than water and leaving is better than staying, following Brooklyn Beckham's statement about his parents.
Even Sara Cox was at it. Lovely Sara Cox, the nation’s big sister, giggling on her Radio Two show at Brooklyn Beckham and the emotional bomb site that’s his family.
Newspapers, TV channels, radio stations. They all found it funny. Perhaps the joke was somehow in the fact that the pain is being suffered by the super-rich and their children. Is that it? Schadenfreude?
Though millions of folk, I suspect, didn’t find the story of Beckham’s irreconcilable split with his family funny at all. I certainly didn’t.
Not because I’m some po-faced puritan, or because I put the rich and famous on a pedestal - far from it, I assure you. I’ve no envy of the Instagram class. But because I empathise with him.
I’ve been through much the same myself - as have men and women all across this land.
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Family estrangement isn’t uncommon. Indeed, sadly, it’s very common. There’s few I know who haven’t felt the wound of a rift which cannot be mended with a parent or sibling.
My own experience of family estrangement is uncomfortably close to that of Beckham.
There’s differences, variations on similar themes - a swapping in some places of characters, roles, events and motives - but broadly, and without going into detail for reasons I hope you can appreciate, I know what he’s experiencing.
It sounds as if Beckham had a troubled childhood and finally - as he’s reached maturity in his twenties - decided that enough is enough.
When I’m asked what my childhood was like, I say: “Have you seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
That’s a play - a masterpiece - by Edward Albee. It was turned into a movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as George and Martha, a demented husband and wife who verbally eviscerate each other on a nightly basis. They turn domestic cruelty into performance art, using sadistic mind-games to destroy one another.
When I first watched the film as a teenager, I couldn’t believe how horribly close it came to my own experience. Fortunately, George and Martha never had children.
As I said, my experience doesn’t directly mirror Brooklyn Beckham. But I know enough to feel great empathy for him. These domestic agonies are everywhere once you look, once you ask.
My wife, for example, is estranged from a close family relative. Many of my friends no longer talk to one or other of their parents, or one of their brothers or sisters.
It can take a long time to realise that the people with whom you share blood aren’t good for you.
The reason it takes so long to learn such a lesson is that you do everything you can to lie to yourself. You don’t want to accept that someone so close to you is damaging to you.
To accept that truth is to start to question the nature of familial love: the love between siblings, the love of parents for children, and the love of children for their parents.
Nobody wants to search their soul on such matters. It’s better to hide. But to hide is to simply deny and delay.
Unless you wish to suffer your entire life, at some point those of us with damaging relatives must admit to ourselves that the relationship must either change or end.
It sounds as if Brooklyn Beckham tried his best to mend what was broken, failed, and came to the conclusion that there’s no more point trying.
I’ve walked that lonely, sad path too. I’ve tried to build bridges, only to see them torn down repeatedly.
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Eventually, you tire of being the builder. Is that what you are, you ask yourself: the builder in a world of destroyers? Only a fool or masochist would continue that cycle of despair.
I learned long ago that blood isn’t thicker than water. Blood is just something that’s spilt, along with sweat and tears, when you try to make an impossible relationship work.
That’s the most painful lesson I’ve ever learned in my life. But if you’ve damaging people in your family, you must learn that lesson before it’s too late. Before they sink you.
They mean not mean to sink you - they may very well love you, and you may very well love them - but the damage they do will eventually drag you under.
Nobody can carry the baggage of family damage around with them for the entirety of their life and not sink at some point.
You may be strong, but no-one is that strong. So to stay whole, to stay sane - to remain as good a person as you can be for the people who truly matter in your life, the people who truly show you love - you’ve got to, at some stage, look out for yourself.
However, to learn that lesson, to make that break, to act in your own self-interest for once, is also to suffer pain.
The very act of breaking with a damaging relative - or worse, a group of damaging relatives - is to remove the sword that was plunged into your heart by another, and replace it with a dagger from your own hand.
To help yourself, you must hurt yourself. To break with a relative is to admit that love failed, that blood failed, that you, that they, that the family failed.
Yes, you’ll be free from the damage another does to you, but to escape that damage you must damage yourself. There’s the irony of human existence for you.
It’s a bargain with the Devil. There’s no truly good solution in damaged families. That sadly is how life and love operate sometimes in this world.
It will get better for Brooklyn Beckham, though. The first cut is the deepest. There’s truth in cliché.
Eventually, the pain of undoing, of accepting that reconciliation is impossible, will ease, and there will come a time when the wound has scarred over enough for it not to hurt too much.
Then, he’ll come to realise that the suffering was both inevitable and worth it, and - I very much hope - he’ll have a family of his own which is very different to the one from which he came, a family that will love him and be loved in return.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics
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