“The melancholy of all things done” is the way Buzz Aldrin once described the emptiness that followed walking on the moon. He was never quite the same.
“We weren’t trained to smell the roses or to utter life-changing aphorisms. That’s why for years I have wanted Nasa to fly a poet, a singer or a journalist into space – someone who could capture the emotions of the experience and share them with the world.”
Nasa is still yet to send anyone other than a trained astronaut to space, which is boring of them, but thankfully mankind has Jeff Bezos batting for “Team Have A Laugh”. In April, the Amazon chief sent the singer, Katy Perry, to somewhere near the outskirts of space, and lo, the world finally had the chance to see how the experience might change one of the best selling artists in history.
When Perry hit terra firma that dry spring day and emerged from her capsule, she kissed the ground, then Bezos’s shiny head, and strode back on to our planet with a renewed sense of purpose.
“I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you – how much love you have to give and how loved you are – until the day of launch,” she said, which is probably the sort of thing Aldrin was reaching for.
“Whatever you dream of is in our reach, especially in today’s day and age. Dream big, wish for the stars – and one day, you could maybe be among them,” Perry added.
But what would she do next? What does the woman who’s already been among the stars dream of now? And who would receive all that love she’s realised she had to give? If your best guess for the answer to those three questions was “former Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau”, well, maybe sit the rest of this one out.
But also: no it wasn’t.
Rumours about Perry and Trudeau have crept around the world ever since they were photographed having dinner together in Montreal earlier this year.
Perry, 40, had recently announced she’d split with serial elf Orlando Bloom, with whom she shares a daughter. Trudeau, 53, had recently broken up with both Sophie Grégoire, the mother of his three children, and his job, having tendered his resignation as prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party in March.
Trudeau later attended Perry’s ongoing, 84-date The Lifetimes Tour with his 16-year-old daughter, Ella-Grace. There he was, filmed rocking back and forth in quiet awe as Perry rolled around dressed like an alien goddess, mouthing along to Firework.
One reviewer compared the show to “being high on Haribo while trapped in a theme park”.
The gossip mill had a problem, though. In keeping with the notoriously watertight firearm laws Trudeau upheld, there were no smoking guns. For all we knew, it could have been a simple, platonic friendship struck between two single people united by their desperate quest to find a PR time machine that might return them to the heights of the early 2010s.
At that time, they were both the shiny new-ish thing – two straightforwardly charming stars with wavy, raven black hair and a popularity built on their harmless promise. In the years to come, as the world turned sour and rivals exposed Perry and Trudeau’s relative lack of talent in offering much beyond pyrotechnics and dimples, they would desperately try to keep up, only to dig further and further away from relevance. So, yes, they could have simply been talking about that.
And then it came.
The clear-as-day proof tabloid editors had been searching for, in the form of a photograph taken of the pair on Perry’s yacht off the coast of Santa Barbara last month.
Perry and Trudeau spotted embracing on a yacht off the coast of Santa Barbara – SWNS
There are cave paintings more intelligible than the images, which are so pixelated as to be nearer mosaics, but we are led to believe they show Perry, wearing a bikini, and Trudeau, shirtless but in jeans (or a Canadian bikini, as it’s known), locked in a kiss. Her hands are around his neck, his are making the sort of land grabs he once deplored Donald Trump for suggesting.
The “proof”, which is now the most famous “well-this-proves-little” amateur pap shot since the 1934 surgeon’s photo of the Loch Ness Monster, was taken by a tourist on a nearby whale watching expedition. The cetacea offerings must have been poor that day, but thank God this enterprising peeping Tom had the wherewithal to capture the white whale of North American celebrity gossip.
There can surely be vanishingly few people in the middle of a Venn diagram of marine life enthusiasts and individuals who can identify Justin Trudeau by his arm tattoo at a distance of 100ft, but we’ve found them. And they found the Daily Mail.
The world is now reeling – it’s the biggest global news today, anyone would agree – and attempting to make sense of things. But in a way, it does add up.
Trudeau, who already had a penchant for wraparound sunglasses, folksy charm, mortifying fancy dress outfits and shark tooth necklaces, was always going to be one of the most aggressively divorced men of all time. Dating a celebrity, especially one beloved by his daughter and in the same industry as his RnB singer son, was entirely plausible.
Trudeau and his ex-wife, Sophie Gregoire, greet supporters as they celebrate election victory in Montreal, Canada – Valerie Blum/Rex
The son of Pierre Trudeau, himself prime minister of Canada, Justin was the political princeling who rose to become the second-youngest PM in the country’s history when he won a majority government in 2015.
In Trudeau Jr, Canada finally had a photogenic, affable world leader who was as comfortable in a town hall debate as he was cosying up to celebrities. His young family and liberal politics made him – to many – mild and relatable. And when he stood next to Barack Obama, David Cameron et al, he looked entirely at home.
Regrettably for him, though, he started his premiership in late 2015, not late 2008. The Western world was rapidly going off politicians like him almost as soon as he arrived, replacing them with populists instead. A decade later, when he left power having long ago lost the patience of the Canadian people, as well as his marriage, he seemed like a man lost in a world he no longer recognised.
As for Perry’s own bingo card, the sky is the limit, as she would probably say. The random twists and turns of her career and personal life are whiplash-inducing.
The daughter of strict pastors who travelled the US setting up churches, she grew up in such a religious household that her mother insisted the family refer to deviled eggs as “angeled eggs”. Call it an inherent eccentricity or an unquenchable desire to shock, then, but Perry went on to create a brand that was somehow at once harmless and sexy, weird and entirely lacking in edge.
In 2010, she married Russell Brand, the former comedian and actor, and current cancel culture casualty and born again conspiracy theorist, in a traditional Hindu ceremony in India. To the alarm of everybody, that marriage was not forever.
In Bloom, she found a man willing to act as her naked paddleboard gondolier during a career downturn that saw her do adverts for Just Eat.
By the time 2025 rolled around, Perry’s comeback album had been eviscerated to such a degree that she must have wanted to leave the planet. Which is what she did, of course, courtesy of her friend Lauren Sanchez’s rocket-to-be. The online backlash to the trip was severe, but Perry, who could never be accused of moving through the world dogged by self-awareness, felt that everyone had missed the point.
And they had. After all, she has always been about the show, less about the substance.
“Returning to Earth, that was the challenging part,” Buzz Aldrin said. But then, as he pointed out, he wasn’t a singer. When it came to Katy Perry’s turn, she simply touched down and immediately elected to make another decision so random, so devastatingly uncool, that you cannot help but admire her commitment to the bit.
She has smelt the roses. She saw infinity, and she went beyond. What a ride. What a whale-watcher.
