"The grown-up equivalent of the playground chant ‘Fight, fight, fight, fight!’ has gone up.

Rumours began that Jessica Chastain (star of Zero Dark Thirty and the one I keep getting mixed up with Cate Blanchett because they both look like fluted glasses of champagne) ‘hated’ Jennifer Lawrence (Katniss in The Hunger Games and the one I get mixed up with Kristen Stewart on the grounds that they are both appear in young-adult book-based franchises and I am 106 years old).

Chastain responded to the rumours with a Facebook post I’m going to quote at length because it made me cheer so hard: ‘I find it very sad that the media makes up bogus stories about women fighting in this industry… Why do we support the myth that women are competitive and cannot get along? Please don’t allow the media to perpetuate the myth that women aren’t supportive of each other. Every time an actress is celebrated for her great work, I cheer. For the more brilliant their performance, the more the audience demands stories about women. With support and encouragement, we help to inspire this industry to create opportunities for women. And as we all know: a great year for women in film, is just a great year for film.’

It was one of those Wizard Of Oz moments, when someone pulls back the curtain and reveals – or at least reminds us of – the workings behind the scenes. Chastain’s post reminds us of two things: the first and more general one, is that what we see and hear does not necessarily have any bearing on the truth. We do, of course, all know this, but the problem is that the onslaught of lies, untruths and obfuscations is so unrelenting that there is not always time to step back, clear our minds of the roar of nonsense and let common sense and reality reassert themselves. And often, there is no clear spot of ‘reality’ to allow us to anchor ourselves. Sometimes the best we can do in a maelstrom of ‘quotes’ from ‘close friends’ and ‘unnamed sources’ is rank the stories within our purview from most likely to least likely to be true.

“Women – not always at each other’s throats”