I think it was a huge mistake to run it like that. If they wanted to use it you could take out all the baby bits and the bits where Aitkenhead gets all excited about the tragedy - like this:
Lily Allen's recent decision to withdraw from the world of pop music into rural domesticity has caused quite a degree of surprise, even scepticism, among fans who couldn't quite believe that a 25-year-old star at the height of her game would give it all up for an Aga and wellies. She couldn't seriously mean it, could she? But yes, she says, she and her boyfriend, a builder, have already moved to the Cotswolds, and their plans for chickens, ducks and Gloucester Old Spot pigs are well under way.
"I never really said I was retiring; that's not really a word that I ever really used. But how I feel right now is just not to be writing music, and not to be going on the road. Because of piracy there has been a massive downturn in people buying music, which makes it more difficult for artists to make money from the sale of records. So what happens is you make money from touring ? and that's all very well if you really enjoy touring. But personally ? well, with the thought of little kids running around that doesn't really work for me."
She looks clear-eyed and glossy, but keeps her arms tightly folded and speaks softly, gazing down into her lap. This is quite a major life change, isn't it? "Kind of," she yawns. "But then I feel as if I go through a major life change about once a year, so it just feels like the next one." She starts to giggle to herself, a flat, private laugh which seems intended to exclude rather than communicate.
I'm a little thrown. Everything about the Allen I meet is pointedly guarded, as if the most innocuous question were an unwelcome intrusion, to be grudgingly endured rather than engaged with. And yet as an artist she has been famous ? notorious, even ? for an almost incontinent compulsion to share whatever thoughts she might have with the world. In the past she has blogged that Bob Geldof is a "sanctimonious prat", Kylie's appearance at Glastonbury a "betrayal of the festival's original values", the Pussycat Dolls a "really bad role model for little girls", and Cheryl Cole a "horrible, nasty, disgusting human being". No more restrained about herself, she once memorably declared herself "fat, ugly and shitter than [Amy] Winehouse", and has never denied experimenting with drugs ? "I am not ashamed of it."
To see why fans love Allen, you only have to scan the comments posted on websites listing her lyrics: "Lily is the most funniest, realest gurl," or "Her songs are so True and Fun!". The songs are celebrated for the cheerful candour of their intimacy, with the 2009 single Not Fair bemoaning an ex-boyfriend's premature ejaculation, while Alfie, a hit from her 2006 debut album, was a jokey hymn to her irritation with her stoner baby brother Alfie.
Allen also has a half-sister, Sarah Owen, five years her senior. The pair share the same mother, and grew up together, but fell out as teenagers and were estranged until 2008, when Allen wrote a song about her called Back to the Start, recalling teenage jealousies and resentment, with lines such as: "People seem to love you, they gravitate towards you/That's why I started to hate you so much."
Allen has subsequently spoken about worrying that Sarah, 30, was lacking direction, and becoming a bit of a beach bum ? "that's not really what you want to be doing in your 30s" ? and as part of her post-pop reinvention she has now opened a vintage dress shop in Covent Garden for Sarah to manage, which is where we meet. Both sisters are there, and Sarah is the friendlier of the two, evidently deeply touched by her sister's song, and grateful to Allen for giving her a job.
If I were Sarah I'm not sure I'd have felt quite so benign towards a baby sister who had publicly blamed her for family problems in their past, and described her lifestyle as "a loose end" from which she needed rescuing, so it's a good job everything has worked out so well between them. But writing public songs about private relationships is high-risk, so I wonder if for Allen her music feels more cathartic than calculated.
"Yeah it does. I'm just not a private person. It's not like I do things because I want things to be public; it's just that's my way of expressing myself, and I happen to be very famous. I don't write songs with the thought that millions of people are going to listen to this. Like with Alfie, I didn't think anyone would hear it when I wrote it. I've written hundreds of songs and no one's ever heard them, and that just happened to be one my record company thought might be quite good, so it went on the album. But it never really occurred to me that people would hear it."
It sounds faintly implausible, but I'm inclined to believe her, because I have a friend who used to be a newspaper columnist and was forever amazed when anything she wrote caused a fuss, as she seemed to have forgotten it was going to be published. "Well I can totally understand that," Allen agrees. "I couldn't write any other way. I don't really see how any song can not feel contrived if it isn't honest, and how could I write honest songs if I don't write about stuff going on in my life and how I'm feeling?
"But now what's happened to me is that I'm pregnant, and I'm quite wealthy, and I've got a nice house in the country, and these are the things that are prominent in my head, but I couldn't possibly write songs about that because it would be completely lost on my generation. So it's about finding those same emotions in things that happen to me that also happen to everybody else ? and you know, having arguments with your sister is one of those things."
There have been two popular readings of Allen's outspoken reputation. The first sees her as an unusually sophisticated media operator; a professional controversialist who knows how to play the publicity game to her advantage. "I really don't," she interrupts. "I can promise you I really don't." The other version is of a young star incapable of self-censorship, who keeps opening her mouth with no thought to the consequences.
"It's totally the latter. But I guess maybe it's to do with something my mum always said to me. I've always felt like a really bad person ever since I was a kid. Yeah, I don't know what it is, I've just had this feeling deep within myself that I'm not a very good human being. And my mum used to try and drill it into me, 'You've got to stop beating yourself up, you're a good person and everything you do comes from a good place, blah blah blah.' And actually I know that everything I do comes from a good place. I try to help other people."
Yet she still thinks of herself as bad person? "No I don't think of myself like that, it's just this deep feeling hanging over me. It's like a childhood thing, it's been with me since I was very small, you think everything's your fault. Maybe it's cos my parents divorced when I was very young, I don't know, it's just a weird thing. But yes, the candour and being so honest about everything, I guess that's in order to cope with that feeling of guilt, or whatever it is that I've been carrying around over the years. I'm very unapologetic, because actually I do know that everything I do comes from a good place. So there isn't any shame in me sharing everything because I've got nothing to be ashamed of, so why would I not be honest about everything? I've got nothing to hide."
And yet, last year Allen closed down her blog, switched off her internet connection at home, and said farewell to Twitter. (She has since resumed tweeting, "But not on the scale I used to, nothing like. I don't let it be a bit part of my life.") With hindsight, does she think her big mouth had been refreshingly honest, or ill-judged? "I think it was refreshingly honest," she says after a long pause, "because I think if I hadn't done that then I would have just blended into the same boring pop star that everyone else is."
So what happened? My guess is she imagined she was going to take on the bland culture of modern pop, and change it ? and found out she couldn't, and conceded defeat.
"Yeah, that's totally it," she agrees. "Because it's so powerful, they just make you look like a twat. Which they did." But then she adds: "And also, there's too much money riding on all of that stuff now. With the downturn in sales of music, people like me earn their money from endorsing brands, and you can't go round slagging people off or being honest about your hedonistic lifestyle if you want to make any money."
Now we seem to be getting to the bottom of her unease. Allen has designed a Samsung laptop, branded with the logo of her shop, and the interview was convened to plug it. Giving interviews as a creative musician is one thing, but if I were her, I say, I'd hate having to talk about my private life in order to peddle a computer. How does she decide how much to give of herself in return for a commercial plug?
"Erm, I don't know." She looks intensely glum. "I haven't really worked that one out, to be honest. I mean, the lady [from Samsung] said, 'Is there anything you don't want to talk about?;" By now Allen is mumbling into her chest, her words a low slur of doleful resignation. "But I don't really want to think about it. You know, it's just another interview in another newspaper." She says she doesn't feel compromised ?"It's not like I've got to sing a song about Samsung" ? but I'm not so sure, and it seems heartbreakingly sad that someone so spirited should have been tamed so soon by the music industry and the media. Allen became famous only four years ago, yet already she has the ennui of a jaded veteran.
But then she has always been old beyond her years, and always anxious for financial security. Her father, actor Keith Allen, left her mother when she was just three, and the family lived a fairly hand-to-mouth existence in a council flat for nine years, until her mother moved in with Harry Enfield. Suddenly there was money for boarding school, but by the age of 15 Allen had been to more than a dozen schools, had been expelled from many of them, and had no interest whatsoever in education. A precocious party girl, she could see no point in exams, as she already knew what she wanted to do.
"I wanted to make a lot of noise, and make a lot of money. It was from my dad, really. I was fascinated by being able to basically do what you want, and know that somebody would wake you up in the morning and tell you what to do. I remember when I was with my dad he'd be filming or shooting or whatever and literally he'd be hungover and some runner would be sent to knock on his door and wake him up with a cup of coffee and nurse him through the day. And I thought, that looks like quite a good idea," she laughs. "I thought I want to get myself to that stage, where someone comes and sorts everything out.
"That literally was the goal. It wasn't necessarily to be a singer or an actress. I just felt like I couldn't deal with the everyday responsibilities of life, paying bills and all of that. I'm terrible at all of that. So I knew I had to make enough money to pay someone else to deal with all of that."
By the sounds of it, she was probably right; she'd managed to run up £20,000 worth of parking tickets by the time she turned 21 and released her debut album. "But it's not really about money," she goes on. "It's about home."
Allen had already been pregnant once before, but miscarried and subsequently split from the father, the Chemical Brothers' Ed Simons. She was only 22 at the time, yet already ready to settle down. It sounds like the classic longing to correct a chaotic childhood, but she says: "I don't think it's even necessarily a family thing, it's a home thing. I just like to feel like I'm literally cosy, under a blanket, and then I'm fine. I travel everywhere with a pillow and a blanket. As long as I've got somewhere to hunker down then I'm OK." The appeal of the house in the country, she says, is that "I can hide there." Who from? "People. People with mobile phones and cameras. Just people."
Does she ever wonder whether she might have been happier if her teenage dreams of stardom had never come true?
"No, not really, because it's enabled me to have my nice house in the country, which is ultimately what's going to make me happy."
(This interview took place before Lily Allen sadly miscarried her baby)
You know - that sort of thing. Just no need for the rubbing the nose in it. Utterly vile.