Keep your posh headphones, Santa George
HO, HO, HO. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a little bit of fantasy. Mine used to involve George Clooney hearthside in a suit of scarlet flannel trimmed with swansdown, holding out the Jan Naughty Or Nice annual Return sheet with a twinkle in his eye and a bottle of champagne in his hand.
But we have all moved on. especially him, I think it’s fair to say.
and since hearing that George is a real-life santa who once surprised 14 of his best friends by giving each of them a wheelie bag stuffed with a million dollars in cash (tax paid), I have had to recalibrate my feelings about the Hollywood star. George said the money was for his chums standing by him through the hard times, which I thought was a lovely gesture at first. But was it really?
Instead of presenting the cash at a big dinner, would it have been better to have a quiet word in an individual ear, then slip the money into their bank account?
Did it really have to be so public, such lookat-me generosity, served up in such small denomination banknotes to ensure that it looked enormous?
I can’t help thinking it was really more about control than anything else. This was compounded by George then giving out noisecancelling headphones to fellow passengers when he was flying with wife amal and their baby twins.
Readers, I do think that if I had paid £11,000 for a first-class British airways ticket one way from la to london, and the Clooneys, complete with their two bawling tots, swept into the cabin, it would take more than noise-cancelling headphones to drown out my own screams.
Babies in first class? I love ol’ cash-rich, generous, crumple-eyed, not-so-secret santa George. But he’s gone too far this time.