Sadly money can’t buy you love
AMANDA Holden as Crimewatch reporter? The TV presenter posted footage online of a gang of moped thieves attempting to rob a young mother in the street near Holden’s home. Scaffolders are seen giving chase with their metal poles. As a mother of two little girls Amanda must have been aghast. Let’s hope the video leads to arrests. I’M of the wrong generation to have ever used a dating agency but thank God for that. Going back a couple of centuries I met almost all my ex-boyfriends and both my husbands the usual way: at work. But according to a wealthy businesswoman called Tereza Burki, who at 47 and as the mother of three children should know better, a matchmaking agency has an absolute duty to deliver the goods, ie, a suitable rich man willing to marry and have children with her, or, to quote her, the agency is nothing but a “scam” and “fraudulent”.
Ms Burki paid £12,000 to join a dating service called Seventy Thirty Ltd. She told the agency she wanted to find the “man of her dreams” preferably with “multiple residences”.
Well, that should be simple, shouldn’t it? Men with multiple residences live right next door to the nearest money tree. Easy to spot.
Except that Seventy Thirty failed to deliver Tereza what she wanted – someone who, apart from the plethora of top-notch homes, shared her wealthy I LOVE serendipity. I know coincidences are just that – freaks of circumstance – but they are moments to relish. I had one last weekend. On Saturday night I put the bedside light out after finishing re-reading Dambuster Guy Gibson’s riveting memoir Enemy Coast Ahead (written when he was just 25 and already a veteran bomber pilot). Next morning I was hosting Radio 2’s Sunday brunch slot. During a music track I glanced out of the studio window and there, right in front of me, framed by the soundproofed glass, was Gibson’s warhorse: a Lancaster bomber. It was banking hard and tight and low, just as Gibson’s aircraft had as he “ROB McKenna was a Rain God, although he didn’t know it. But the clouds knew they loved him and wanted to be near him, to cherish him, and to water him.” Rob McKenna is one of Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams’s funniest incidental creations. McKenna has no idea he’s a Rain God: he thinks lifestyle, was willing to travel frequently and was open to having yet more children with her. And so she’s suing the agency to win back her membership fee plus damages for “distress, disappointment and frustration”.
When I read this story I had to check it again to make sure Tereza really was 47 and not 14. Honestly, does this lady (who lives in Chelsea in a street where apartments sell for £3million) really think a computer dating service can generate identikit males with fat wallets and a desperate desire to have kids (and remember Ms Burki, a divorcee, already has three)?
Do women like her feel so entitled to a rich husband and jet-set lifestyle that they really think they can just click a mouse and – hey – the right guy will walk straight through their front door?
I loved The Beatles’ lyrics quoted by a judge last week in a written ruling ahead of this case.
“I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love.”
Ms Burki obviously profoundly disagrees.
lancasteRs aRe still the staRs of the skies
barrelled in over the Mohne damn to drop his bouncing bomb. The studio soundproofing meant I couldn’t hear it but the throbbing vibration from the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines was evident in my freshly poured cup of coffee: the surface of the liquid rippled and shimmered in sympathy.
Lancasters were of course death-traps for their crews of seven, usually boys still in their teens and 20s. Bomber Command’s casualty rate was terrifying. (Gibson died when his Mosquito crashed on a night raid over Holland.) And the aircraft dealt in indiscriminate death: he’s just an ordinary lorry driver, but his logbook shows it rains on him every single day, anywhere he’s ever been. Holiday after holiday are comprehensive washouts.
My missus and I are beginning to know how the guy feels. When we flew to Australia in December – midsummer down there – where I was filming, it rained every day. A few weeks later we were in Dubai on business. It poured, the desert was drenched. Last hundreds of thousands of German civilians perished under the colossal weight of the Lancasters’ payload.
And yet, and yet… there’s something strangely beautiful about this extraordinary aircraft. Maybe it’s because we know that Lancasters helped pulverise fascism in the heart of Europe.
Or maybe it’s just their pure physicality: that arcing, curving wingspan, those glinting cockpit and gun turret canopies, the mighty, whirling propellers.
All I know is that last Sunday morning I was blown away. month we were in Los Angeles. The Golden State was stubbornly overcast, damp and cold.
Now we’re in Nice. Apparently it has been beautiful here for weeks – until the day we arrived. As our plane touched down the clouds rolled in. The Baie des Anglais looks more like Blackpool Beach in March.
So if you’re on holiday on the Cote d’Azur… I can only apologise. A very different ball game! LAST Sunday the weather was so glorious we wanted to go to our favourite local pub for lunch in its garden. But long experience has taught us that the Spaniards Inn in North London on a sunny weekend is absolutely packed, despite its lovely, enormous garden, it’s hard to get a table. Then – epiphany. It was the afternoon of England’s world cup clash with Panama. Richard had driven home from his morning R2 stint and said there was hardly a car on the road. Everyone was at home, glued to the telly.
So surely The Spaniards would be deserted?
Reader, it was packed. We did manage to get a table, just. I can only conclude that the typical Hampstead male couldn’t care less about footie. Which, as a long-suffering wife and mother of three sons, really cheered me up.