Fame is a rental (mine is due Tuesday)

A boy stopped me outside a supermarket last month, phone already filming, and shouted the Urban News intro at me word for word. Then he looked into my basket, saw the budget bread, and lowered his phone out of respect for the fallen. That, right there, is fame in its natural habitat.

I enjoy being known. I would be lying otherwise, and as established, I am contractually incapable of lying at speed. But I keep a ledger in my head, and on that ledger fame is filed under rentals — enjoyable, useful, and absolutely not mine. The landlord is public attention, and the landlord is moody.

You can always spot the celebrities who think they own the property. They stop preparing. They start explaining. Their captions get longer as their work gets thinner. I have watched it happen the way you watch a slow puncture — no drama, just a gradual loss of altitude and an eventual walk home.

So the rule at Roylandz is simple: feed the work, not the fame. The show gets rehearsed, the tour gets planned, the book got written at 4 a.m. — and the fame can come along if it behaves. Attention is a consequence. The moment you make it the objective, you are competing with every phone in the country, and the phones are undefeated.

Because when the rental notice comes — and it comes for everyone — I intend to hand back the keys politely, walk into a room I actually built, and keep talking. Loudly, obviously. Some things are freehold.