ACCORDING to recent newspaper articles, leading actor Ralph Fiennes as a secret yearning: to be a simple country boy. He claims he would willingly swap his glamorous lifestyle for that of his younger brother Jake, who works as a gamekeeper in Norfolk.

"Whenever I go to see Jake," said Ralph just before the British premiere of The English Patient, "he frog-marches me over the estate, shows me a dead hare and plucks pheasants. I am envious of his life. It is very different from the feeling of being here. I can see the attraction in that."

This seems to be part of a new trend because I can now reveal that only the other week, Baywatch star Pamela Anderson admitted that she is consumed with jealousy for the lifestyle of her older sister Maureen, who left the US some years ago to run a fish farm on Ireland's west coast.

"Whenever I visit Maureen", Pamela confessed to me from her California home, "she introduces me to hundreds of sprat by name. They're just so cute. Then we hit the lake on one of those neat currachs, Maureen nets a full-grown salmon, then grills us a couple of cutlets on an open fire. Afterwards we watch the sun go down on Galway Bay. It's a different kind of Baywatch, but I just love it. I'd swap with her any time."

I had to get the other side of the story, so I decided to visit Maureen, and finally found her in a small village in Connemara where she spends her days looking after half a million salmon sprat.

Maureen turned out to be a low-slung woman of about 46, weighing about 240 pounds. Dressed from head to foot in pale blue PVC rain gear, she was all woman.

When I arrived she was in an outhouse busy cleaning fish tanks with a wire brush. The stink was fierce.

I had scarcely introduced myself when Maureen threw me a scrubbing brush and suggested I join her at work. Before I knew it I was descaling large green plastic fish boxes and rinsing them out with an enormous hose.

We exchanged pleasantries about the weather - naturally it was pouring rain - and I then asked Maureen straight out if it were true that her sister Pamela would prefer to change places with her?

"She sure would", Maureen told me in her seductive Californian twang: "But it ain't nothing to do with envying the simple life. Hell, Pammie is the one with the simple life. That's what I wanted to get away from. The complications I got now, I love `em - but you don't want to hear.

But of course I did.

"Well, being Pammie's sister ain't easy. The thing is, around here nobody knows her. They barely heard of her. So first off, I gotta explain I have a famous sister. Then I gotta explain how she makes so much money. It ain't easy convincing seafaring Connemara folk that a girl can get rich running round a beach in a red swimsuit. Know what I mean? But I sure enjoy trying.

I was beginning to understand the complications of Maureen's life.

Maureen hauled in another great tower of fish boxes from the shingle. "See", she explained, you don't know how simple life gets in California when you got money, the beach-front house in Malibu and a Mercedes roadster. Hell, it ain't no challenge no more. That's why I got out when I did. Pammie's a bit slower on the uptake."

So what about Maureen's love life? Surely things were simpler in the West of Ireland than in California?

"You kidding me? My husband Jimmy is so busy with all his projects I never know where he's gonna be. Pamela, well hell, if she wants to know where her man is or what he's up to, she just gotta check the latest gossip columns.

I was beginning to see the logic of Maureen's move.

So was Pamela being disingenuous in saying she wants a simple life?

"Disingenuous, what the hell kind of word is that? If you mean she's lyin' then she sure as hell is. Pammie is a romantic. She thinks she can handle the simple life but she just ain't got the stamina for it."

My entire body by this time covered with fish scales, I dried off yet another plastic box and gazed out across the Atlantic as Maureen brewed up a huge kettle of tea. She seemed to be making a lot of sense: the whole thing was probably simplicity itself, if Pamela could only realise it.