I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat beside me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.

Swift needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which is a problem. Love needs candle lighting, not floodlighting.

Being in love when you are famous is tough, especially if both lovers are famous. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy and precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves.

They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”

Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance, looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.

If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.

The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.

That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.

When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.

In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.

The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of “Cleopatra,” they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher, and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.

Social rules were tighter then, and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.

My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane.

I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day, I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip while they escaped by a back entrance.

Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.

Every Sunday, we had lunch at a local pub that served traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then, it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.

One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.

I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”

I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.

I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then, and I haven’t changed my mind.

Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely — in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all.

Ready for craic on Sunday?

Craic, pronounced crack, is an Irish word that has seeped into English and means party or revelry.

Try as you may, you won’t avoid Sunday’s craic because on Sunday, March 17, hundreds of millions of people around the world will be wearing the green. In short, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, the national day of the Irish, by putting on something green and taking a drink.

No other nation, let alone a tiny country with a troubled history, can have such a claim on the heartstrings of the planet. For one day, we are all Irish — many of us will go to a place where drink is sold to celebrate it. There isn’t a lot of preamble to St. Paddy’s Day — except for the arrival in the pubs of green-colored beer. Ugh!

The Irish diaspora, which reached its apogee during the Potato Famine of the 19th century, sent the Irish to the far corners of the earth, especially to America, where they endured poverty and eventually prospered.

They brought with them their music, which influenced American Roots Music, like Bluegrass, Folk and Country; their towering literary talent, which gave us generations of writers.

And they got into politics, big time.

A documentary in production and scheduled to be released in 12 episodes at the end of the year, “From Ireland to the White House,” traces the Irish ancestry of 24 U.S. presidents from Andrew Jackson (of Scots-Irish lineage) to Joe Biden.

Tony Culley-Foster, the U.S. representative of Tamber Media, the Dublin company producing the series, tells me the scholarship has been exacting in tracing the ancestry of the presidents. He said the 24 presidents on the list have been certified by the same independent historians and genealogists used by Clinton and Biden. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 31.5 million Americans who claim Irish heritage. So it has become essential for presidents to make pilgrimages to Ireland — to wrap themselves in green.

From my experience in Ireland, the two mainly taken to heart as being of their own were John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, and of those, Kennedy was the greater heartthrob for the Irish.

My late friend Grant Stockdale’s father was Kennedy’s ambassador to Ireland. Grant spent his mid-teen years in Dublin at the U.S. embassy in Phoenix Park. “I knew what it must be like to be royalty,” Grant told me.

But it isn’t just the presidency shaped by Irish heritage. Irish names are to be found on every public service list, from the U.S. Congress to the local school board. There have been great senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and great speakers of the House, like the towering Boston-Irish Tip O’Neill. If it’s politics, it’s Irish.

In Britain, some of the greatest statesmen and orators in the House of Commons have been Irish, think Edmund Burke and Charles Parnell.

Ireland’s gift to the world has been its contribution to English literature. Hundreds of great names come to mind. Try Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett and Edna O’Brien.

And the books keep coming, tumbling out of the most literary fertile minds on earth.

Two contemporary writers dominate my thinking: John Banville and Sally Rooney. Banville is prolific, profound and a joy to read, a master craftsman at the top of his form. Rooney is a kind of literary Taylor Swift, who writes about the sex, love and isolation of young adults of her generation. I am keen to see how she evolves and if she will give joy for generations, as great writers do.

Literacy is part of the fabric of Irish life. An Irish person, far from literary circles, will ask you conversationally, “What is your book?” Translation: “What are you reading?” Ireland treasures books, and reading is a national pastime.

Ireland’s literacy may have saved its economy. At a bleak period when, just 40 years ago, I heard many Irish leaders talk about “structural unemployment” of 22 percent, American scientific publishers found that highly literate women were a resource. That led to a boom in footnoting in Ireland, followed by American Express looking for accurate inputting, and, suddenly, Ireland was transformed from one of the poorest countries of Europe to a boom nation and the Silicon Valley of Europe, as the computer giants moved in. 

Galway, a town known for its bookstores and fishing, became ground zero for computing in Ireland.

Craic has no discernible economic value except for the brewers and distillers, but it is such fun. As the Irish say, Slainte (cheers)!