She’s been seen in a headscarf, snapped with a copy of the Qur’an and has cleared out her Instagram account. None of these things is getting her any closer to Northamptonshire

It was the philosophising Greek Earth-measurer Eratosthenes who said: “Once I have a kid I’m not going to be on Instagram. You know, I’ll probably delete my Instagram and just … I don’t know, live life.” Or was it Kylie Jenner? The details are unimportant but the message is clear: delete Instagram and live life. Instagram and life-living are mutually exclusive. It is not possible to prove you are in close proximity to an avocado while also being wholly existent.

So what are we to make of Lindsay Lohan deciding this week to clear out her Instagram account, which at the time of writing has 5.8 million followers, precisely zero posts, and a bio that consists of no more than “Alaikum salam” with a hand emoji? Is Lindsay now living life with an intensity that she was not before? Is it now more meaningful, or more joyful, and, in either case, is she doing loads of congas? A more important issue, as many onlookers immediately decided in light of the “Alaikum salam” bio, is she doing all that because she has converted to Islam?

Heat, for instance, managed to get an impressive 400 words between its story’s headline (“So HAS Lindsay Lohan converted to Islam or not?”) and the quote from the star’s spokesman in its penultimate paragraph (“She has not converted [to Islam]”), before signing off with a cheery: “So THERE YOU GO.”

There we go, indeed! The denial from Lohan’s rep came with such speed that in another part of the internet, Digital Spy was able to pull off an unintentional, I’m sure, clickbait-and-switch masterclass: a Facebook post titled “Lindsay Lohan converts to Islam and deletes Instagram” actually leads to a story headlined: “No, Lindsay Lohan is NOT converting to Islam — she’s just taking a break from Instagram.”

Again, THERE YOU GO. But if Lohan was not officially living life until disembowelling her Instagram account, she was definitely doing something. Still on Digital Spy, we see in the past three months alone she has been keeping herself very busy. See if you can guess which of these headlines Lost in Showbiz has made up: “Lindsay Lohan gets part of her finger ripped off while trying to anchor a boat”; “Lindsay Lohan tells entire club to ‘shut the fuck up’, they don’t and it gets real awkward”; “Lindsay Lohan joins Jamie Oliver in Southend-on-Sea for his cooking show”; “Lindsay Lohan responds after EastEnders’ Heather Trott replaces her to switch on Kettering’s Christmas lights.”

The truth? None of those headlines has been made up. Lohan’s endeavours may not be the strangest pop cultural happenings in a world where Scarlett Moffat gets 1,700 retweets for a comment about parallelograms and Stephen Mulhern’s ascent to terrestrial primetime continues unchallenged, but they are eyebrow-raising nonetheless and it’s the Kettering story to which we return today.

Lohan’s run-in with the Northamptonshire town is a story arc whose apparent denouement last November – having promised to turn on the town’s Christmas lights by way of an apology for dissing it, she ended up doing nothing of the sort – was robbed of its natural time in the spotlight by the fallout of the US election. Lohan’s run-in with Kettering had begun while she was livetweeting June’s Brexit vote, which does present the possibility that Lohan’s current MO is to aim for a tentpole PR moment around every major political moment. If this is the case, don’t be surprised if she pulls something truly massive out of the bag during the Trump inauguration. But as attention-grabbing as it might be for a nine-fingered Lohan to shout “shut the fuck up” while converting to Islam with Jamie Oliver on a poorly moored boat, it would be a shame for that to overshadow another development in Lohanworld: the news this week that, far from being over, that Kettering feud rages on.

It’s true! While some were pondering the significance of Lohan’s penchant for headscarves, and that time in 2015 when she was pictured carrying a copy of the Qur’an, the fearless Press Association had bigger fish to fry. Having made a Freedom of Information request (and if this isn’t apt use of the Freedom of Information Act, what is?), PA had got its hands on correspondence between Kettering borough council and Lohan’s representatives.

Records show that Kettering contacted the star’s people a month before the switch-on, to be told that Lohan’s representatives were “very supportive” of the event taking place. We now know, of course, that it would never happen, but can we blame Kettering for believing that it might? Lohan exists in the Hasselhoffian sphere of celebrity where household names appear in ads for comparison websites. Stranger things, the Kettering crew must have thought, have happened.

Anyway, PA’s valuable FoI request reveals that last November, with time running out and Lohan’s appearance in some doubt, Kettering appeared to play hardball, telling Lohan’s people that “the media will start to come to their own conclusions”. It was then suggested that a video message might be the best way to salvage the debacle, and that’s what Lohan eventually delivered via Twitter. That video message has now been deleted from her Twitter feed (it can be found with a little digging on the web), but big up to those optimistic souls at Kettering borough council who, apparently unbothered by the temporal limitations imposed by transatlantic travel, were even calling Lohan’s people on the day of the switch-on. And much respect to PA for bringing these matters to light.

As for Lindsay Lohan, here’s to many enjoyable congas between now and her reappearance on Instagram.