For instance, I can’t get my head around the idea that most people really do give a damn about people’s opinions of them, even people they’ve never met and/or have no respect for. Is it really only myself and a few other differently abled oddballs who skip gaily through life not giving a toss what any joker thinks of their weight, work or morals? Surely not! But then you come across some major weirdness like Toyah Willcox claiming she had major cosmetic surgery just because Jonathan Ross — JONATHAN ROSS! — said she was too ugly to be on television. No one would pretend to care about Jonathan Ross’s opinion on their looks; that would be like pretending to care about Geri Halliwell’s opinion of their voice — or mine of their parenting skills. But surely to genuinely have regard for these is even weirder? “Life, eh, Lord Russell! — what’s it all about?” as the cabbie famously said to the philosopher.

In a similar vein, I would until recently have assumed that when Tim Henman told Now magazine, when asked whether he would like his daughters to be professional tennis players, “I think it’d be hard for them — there’d be too many comparisons,” he was speaking in a humorous vein. I showed it, chortling, to a few people; however, they then felt moved to correct me, pointing out that he was actually deadly serious — and furthermore, that Daily Hell seasonal stalwarts such as “Henmania” and “Henman Hill” were not in fact examples of admirably dry sarcasm but rather full-on, tongues-out cheerleading. And when I read the question “Can you win Wimbledon this year?” and Tiny Tim’s answer was: “Absolutely — my game keeps getting better all the time,” (not to mention tennis being “the only career decision I’ve ever made and it seems to have worked out”) I realised that my friends were absolutely right. And that I had been living in some sort of inverted Neverland where I believed that everyone was sarcastic, dry and steeped in self-knowledge.

Exactly where I got this crazy idea from I have no idea; especially working as I do in the media, with one eye forever on the antics and pronouncements of assorted warblers, drolls, sports and thesps. Everywhere one looks, it seems now, Man is born clear-eyed but chooses delusion as a more agreeable companion. Whether it is a celeb who persistently acts like a drunken sailor on 24-hour shore-leave yet talks about themselves in terms that might have you mistaking them for Mahatma Gandhi’s natural successor, or the actress/model who swears that she lost half of her pre-pregnancy body-weight by “running around after the baby” whereas she actually had three ribs removed and lives on 200 calories a day, it must be difficult for people whose profession is Let’s Pretend — and who are so well remunerated for finessing their façade — to see where fiction ends and fact begins.

Never forget the actress who says that being a mother is all that matters to her — before signing up to do six films back-to-back. Or Mel B mouthing with a completely straight face “My music isn’t that important to me — I’m only putting it out to make my mates happy.” If this is indeed true, might I venture that they are happy in a spiteful kind of way? — that is, laughing at poor Mel rather than laughing with her.

But what about the rest of us? In civilian life, it’s accepted wisdom to see men as the spectacularly self-deluding sex, but I’ve got to say that we girls can go for it with gusto. Nancy Dell’Olio regularly exhibits levels of self-delusion that would not look out of place in the bazaars of Thespus, whether comparing her charitable works with those of Diana, Princess of Wales, announcing to the world that she is the only woman for Sven or, astonishingly, dressing up in full Bollywood fig and turning up at the Asian Women of Achievement Awards.

When it comes to looks, women can persuade themselves of anything. A pleasant-looking but unexceptional middle-aged friend of mine used to amaze me when, after a few drinks, she would invariably say, perfectly seriously, “Men look at me and automatically think of sex.” Similarly, even when I was a size 20, I looked in the mirror and saw a total babe. Poor Abi Titmuss has recently taken it further than believing her own publicity — she has, it seems, actually believed her own air-brushing, and believes that if you don’t have a gut on the cover of Maxim, so it is in real life.

But while deluding yourself about your looks may be slightly loveable in an all-toohuman type of way, deluding yourself about the superiority of your own moral conduct is rather repulsive. I quite liked Uma Thurman, in a gosh-doesn’t-she-look-like-a-hammerhead-shark sort of way, until I read the widely reported quote that she had called Rebecca Loos a “tramp” for having the sheer molten nerve to turn up on the Kill Bill red carpet. I don’t know what Thurman ’s definition of a tramp is — “a woman who indulges in lewd, unseemly behaviour”, says my AppleWorks thesaurus. Well, trampishness is in the eye of the beholder, and might I suggest that it is quite unseemly (“improper, inappropriate, unbecoming”) to bang on about Buddhism all the time and then accumulate huge amounts of money by appearing in films which show violence as something variously beautiful, exciting and comical — as Miss Thurman, in her work for Quentin Tarantino, has done to an almost wearying degree. And though as far as I know Thurman has not exposed her primary or secondary sex organs for the eyes of strangers in return for money — which is pretty lewd in anyone’s language — I wonder if she judges those of her colleagues who have as harshly as she judges non-actresses who haven’t. I wonder if she regularly calls out, on glimpsing the Misses Moore and Stone on the red carpet: “Oi, Demi, Sharon — ya pair of old tramps — big up yourselves!” No, I think we can safely say that it’s all kiss-kiss, smug-smug up there on Hollywood Olympus.

So far, so sad. However, there is one way to make everyone, even me, love you — that is, by deluding down. Jennifer Garner, one of the most beautiful, charismatic, envied and respected actresses currently working, had this to say recently to Now: “Growing up I was a nerdy girl with glasses who could never get a date. In my heart, I’m still that girl. I can’t get over the fact that I’m now thought of as beautiful — boys just never came near me at school. Have you got any idea what that does to your confidence?” By choosing to put herself down rather than big herself up, the swoonsome Miss Garner demonstrates that to self-delude is human — but to delude down is absolutely divine.

julie.burchill@thetimes.co.uk