To Suffolk, where it seems that Ed Sheeran has been running up against objections to his various home improvements. Things the singer has been allowed to build in the vicinity of his house include a four-room treehouse, an indoor swimming pool, an orangery and a wildlife pond. He has also won planning permission for a football pitch, a private beach and an underground “man cave” – I use the Times’s vocabulary here – which will include a music room and cinema.

But what of things that Sheeran hasn’t been allowed to build? They include a 24-seat chapel. Furthermore, he has now been asked to remove a 5-metre-long sign attached to the outside of his in-garden pub, on the basis that the barn which houses it is a listed building.

Indeed, perhaps displeased by a general sense that Sheeran is taking the piss on the modifications front, some locals have questioned whether his “wildlife pond” is really a wildlife pond at all. Having looked at the aerial pictures from the Times report, I love the look of this wildlife pond, which is pale blue, kidney shaped, appears to be fully tiled, and has sets of steps and a handrail leading down into it. This would be of great assistance to the animals taking the waters, and I am only sorry to read that the sauna erected next to this wildlife pond – presumably to help the creatures make a whole spa visit of their day – will now have to be taken down as planning permission for it was not obtained.

Quite where this tale slots into the four great categories of celebrity planning permission stories is debatable, but they are here laid out for your records.

Celebrity objectors

It is not enough for you to be famous; the person objecting to your architectural folly must also be famous. Jimmy Page v Robbie Williams is one of those disputes where you wish both could somehow lose. The Led Zeppelin legend and the Take That legend have been embroiled in a bitter five-year dispute over Williams’s plan to build a basement swimming pool in his house in Holland Park, London, where Page is a neighbour. Last December, Robbie finally won conditional approval from the council, but the row lives on chiefly as a means for local chancers to make amusing complaints. Earlier this year, one wrote to Kensington and Chelsea town hall complaining that Mr Williams had been playing loud 70s music – Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd – specifically to bait Mr Page. Furthermore, ran this malarial piece of correspondence, Williams was in the habit of dressing up as Page’s former bandmate Robert Plant, by “stuffing a pillow under his shirt in an attempt to mock or imitate Mr Robert Plant’s beer belly that he has acquired in his older age”. This is “embarrassing”, the letter went on, because “Mr Plant was remembered for performing with his shirt open on stage, and obviously he cannot perform in his current condition as it would be very embarrassing”.

Really random celebrity objectors

Objectors are one thing; celebrity objectors are another, but what really works best in these stories is when the celebrity objecting hails from quite another arena of public life. Let’s see this in action.

Despite being the owner of a £10m north London house that was only 13 years old at the time, the former Arsenal star Thierry Henry was beset by that typical homeowner’s dilemma: what do you do if you want to build a four-storey fish tank in your house, but it only has three storeys? The answer we’d all eventually arrive at – however reluctantly – is that you knock the entire house down, and build a new one. This was where Henry found himself in 2012, and duly submitted plans for a new building to the council. It is not for me to speculate what best stirs the heart of council planning committee members in this country – one hardly needs to – but high on the list of things that don’t might be a demand for an essential 40ft-high aquarium. Hang on, you might be crying, this state of the aquariumist’s art would have held 25,000 litres of water, cost £12,000 a year to maintain, and required £2,500 a year on fishfood to keep its residents happy. And you are right. What Henry hadn’t banked on, alas, was a delegation of outraged neighbours, led by acting’s Tom Conti. As it would turn out, Conti would win the battle but lose the war. By abandoning plans for the fish tank, Henry got his design through. Having spent the intervening time complaining about the noise, Conti recently sold his house to Tim Burton, having had to drop the price as a result of what he called “immoral” rates of stamp duty. Consequently, it only went for £11m.

The dogged local council member

There’s always one killjoy, isn’t there? Often, it’s Bear Grylls, insisting you drink your own piss to survive two days without your agent. On this occasion, however, it was a Welsh council official demanding that Grylls explain the vast steel slide structure he’d had bolted on to one steep cliff face of the island he owns off the coast of north Wales. The slide can only be used when the tide is in, with Grylls telling his followers: “You hit the water very fast!!!” Keen that Grylls should collide with reality even faster, Gwynedd council launched an immediate investigation. According to officials, the slide was taken down. As one councillor noted with satisfaction: “He was never going to leave it there.”

If you wouldn’t mind just knocking it all down again

Threatened at one stage of the great Garraway-Draper v Islington council feud, this is the nuclear option. Around the turn of the decade, you could barely move for woeful interviews with ITV breakfast show presenter Kate Garraway and her husband, New Labour bag carrier turned psychotherapist Derek Draper. These concerned the loft extension they had assumed they could get retrospective planning permission for, with said interviews judged a good way of earning money to pay for the £15,000’s worth of changes the council demanded for the structure to stay up. Locally, Garraway’s decision to attack the local residents group voicing concerns about it was something that one of their number judged “tells you all you need to know about her”. As far as official channels went, Garraway’s decision to scream at councillors during one meeting, demanding to be heard, was something that Draper later felt moved to smooth over. As he put it to the officials at the next meeting: “I think you guys know how emotional people can get about their homes.”

Very true. Indeed, perhaps the only true words he had spoken that decade, though that is by the bye. With an £80m net worth, Ed Sheeran probably won’t have to give doleful interviews to OK! to fund the sauna takedown. Even so, he should be mindful of how mad it can get, while we look to the next twist in his modification programme with interest.

Madame couldn’t give a XXXX

Who’s that lady? Why, it’s Madame X. Photograph: Steven Klein

Along with a new single and video and a forthcoming album, Madonna has created a new artistic persona for herself: Madame X. Keen to draw fans into this latest character in the Madonnaverse, Madge has been painting various pen portraits of Madame X, most of which focus on her wild, carefree and wholly unboundaried nature. Or, as Madonna put it in a chat broadcast on Wednesday: “She doesn’t care. Zero you-know-whats.”

What is not to love about “zero you-know-whats”? While I don’t yet know if she has a swear jar, I am working on my own theory that Madame X might be Ned Flanders’s sister. Only time will show, but even at this stage it’s hard to think of someone more completely b****y abandoned. Seriously: no f-word limits. Couldn’t care liddly-ol’-less.