Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Jade Goody. There's been so much said and written about her in recent months and I've kept as far away from it as possible on principle but with her death something valid to write about her has finally come up and I've given up my deliberate ignoring of the matter.
More and more these days celebrities are getting famous for nothing more than being famous and Jade Goody is as good (if not better) an example as any.
And if the truth be told, in my opinion, her death was her most noteworthy accomplishment. But before you all jump up and down in disgust, proclaiming I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, I'm not. I am actually going somewhere with that statement and do have a logically thought out reason for saying what I'm saying. Simply put, her death, as unfortunate and sad as it is, is the one thing I can say I admire her for.
She first burst onto our screens in 2002 as the mouthy dental assistant in Big Brother season three who thought that Cambridge was in London and that East Anglia was in fact 'East Angular' - a foreign country. She was widely credited for being the first, along with fellow contestant PJ, to bring sexual contact to the Big Brother house - possibly not the proudest of her accomplishments.
On coming out of the house she hosted her own reality TV show and appeared regularity in a wide variety of gossip magazines for one mad antic after other, including attacking an elderly woman in line for the cinema.
She lived her life courting as much publicity as possible without actually achieving anything of note and yet in 2007 before entering the now infamous Celebrity Big Brother 5 house she was ranked number 25 in Heat magazine's list of the world's most influential people.
Not long after that she hit the headlines again and became one of Britain's most hated people, after making racist remarks (along with two other contestants) about fellow housemate Shilpa Shetty, calling her 'Shilpa poppadom' among other racially unacceptable comments. As a result Channel 4 received over 54,000 complaints and Shilpa went on to win the competition, propelling her from limited fame to a household name around the world.
Hated by all, there was widespread speculation that she wouldn't be able to bounce back from the bad press and opinion polls showed her to be very unpopular indeed but instead of it being the end of her 15 minutes of fame, she continued to appear in the newspapers and gossip rags for achievements as noteworthy as buying a sports car, launching a new perfume and her involvement in a 'vicious fight with a female partygoer at an Essex nightclub before turning her rage onto a security guard'.
In an attempt to clear her bad name and prove she wasn't a racist (and make some more money), Jade Goody agreed to be a contestant in India's version of Big Brother, Bigg Boss but two days later had to leave the house after being diagnosed with cervical cancer.
With the news of the cancer, she wasn't so hated any more and quite frankly that's as it should be. We can dislike people and think of them as being bad people but cancer is a horrific illness in all its forms. Whatever she said or did, death isn't a punishment that fits the crime and cancer isn't something I'd wish on my worst enemy.
And that brings me back to the beginning where I said that more and more celebrities are famous for nothing more than being famous.
Most of us, myself included, will ridicule the fact that these people don't deserve to be famous and we'll bemoan the fact that so much publicity is given to the unworthy but in this instance I can't help thinking that maybe for once it's a good thing.
Let's face it, who among us wouldn't take the chance if it was given to us to grab that 15 minutes of fame and drag it out as long as possible, making lots of money along the way? We may choose to present ourselves to the public in a less controversial manner but we'd still take the chance where possible.
Jade Goody lived her life in the public eye and died in the same way. Many people criticised her for it saying that dying in front of the cameras was undignified and that it was just her hunger for fame that made her do it but whatever we may think of her reasons, the fact remains that by doing do so she earned a lot of money that will benefit her children who now have to grow up without a mother.
And equally (if not more) importantly in making her death so public she has raised awareness of the disease many fold, with the possible result of saving innumerable lives. The UK's medical authorities report a large upsurge in younger women requesting screening for cervical cancer and health ministers agreed to review the NHS's policy of not offering screening for cervical cancer before the age of 25.
I was never much of a fan and will be the first to admit I couldn't understand why she was ever famous in the first place but now I have to admit there's a good reason she was.
In her life Jade Goody did little more than provide fodder for gossip columnists but in her death she has done women around the world a very large service, the advantages of which will benefit generations to come, that's more than many of us can hope to achieve.
