Taking a view on others’ privacy

The rich are different, as F Scott Fitzgerald once almost said.

But I can find it in my heart to feel a bit sorry for those high-rise, high-status dwellers in some of the incredibly expensive Bankside apartments in London which are now being loomed over by the Tate Gallery viewing terrace.

These inhabitants of some of the capital’s most prized and pricey real estate have just had a judge rule they’ve no right to privacy in their own homes, after bringing an action to stop visitors to the aforementioned art gallery gawping right in their windows.

Now, there is a school of thought that if people are that rich and privileged, anything pretty well serves them right.

It’s hard to sympathise, for example, with people who buy a house on a golf course and then complain that golf balls land in their gardens.

But it turns out that the viewing terrace in question was not there when their homes were built and bought. At £4 million a pop you might well expect to view from on high rather than be viewed, especially as there is no artistic input in this area of the gallery.

Usually, of course, if you were that high in the sky you would not expect to be spied upon by anyone but low-flying aircraft and mischievous drones. But in this case people who live in glass houses appear to have to expect that some nosy beggar will want to peer in at how the other 0.0002% of the population lives.

As I have often remarked before, the only trickle down effect from the extremely wealthy is the one that generally makes the rest of us feel like we are being trickled down upon from a great height. It must be somewhat disconcerting for those already at a great height to find that being high and mighty is little or no protection against unwelcome intrusion.

Feline fine

If you are one of those women who has settled for life as a mad cat lady rather than in the company of an eligible male human, you might, in that case, find yourself consulting your diary for the dates of National Drink Wine With Your Cat Week.

This fascinating feline-centric construct came about as a cross between National Drink Wine Day (February 18, or as we know it in my house “every day of the year”) and National Love Your Pet Day (February 20). One of these days (probably all 365 of them), we will undoubtedly find that there is a National Not Having Enough To Do With Your Time Day but until that happens, let’s just go with what we have.

Which is National Drink Wine With Your Cat Week. Of course, no animal should be given booze, an act that would be both cruel and downright dangerous. But if you find yourself keen to put the “chat” into Chateauneuf or the cat into Frascati, the idea seems to be that you just settle down with a large glass and the cat somewhere in the room.

But, just in case you are one of those sad saps who passes by the Whiskas tins and buys those incredibly expensive little containers of ersatz “gourmet” mog fodder, all is not lost. There is such a thing as cat wine, just bung full of catnip, fish oil and veg juices.

It’s actually hard to imagine anything nastier or more pointless.

This strange concoction might, however, go some way to explaining the origins of those were examples of alcoholic rubbish that most of us have, at some point, felt it necessary to consume, only to wonder to ourselves as it goes over, how exactly it was that the maker got the cat to sit on the bottle.

Picture: PA. The view into the Bankside apartments from the Tate Gallery’s viewing terrace.