I’m so glad I’m too poor to buy a rhino horn

More and more, I find that the news reads like a particularly random game of Consequences. ‘Michael Flatley’s mansion has been burgled by a gang who stole the dancer’s rhino horn, worth over £200,000.’

I had to read this sentence two or three times, just in case I had missed something.

Yes, I knew that Michael Flatley was the grinning Irish dancer from the 1990s whose legs jiggle about as though operating on a separate system from the rest of his body.

And yes, I could imagine he lived in a ‘mansion’, which is Irish for anything taller than a bungalow.

But what on earth was he doing with a rhino horn?

It emerged that Flatley kept the horn in the ‘hunting room’ of his mansion, which also ‘boasts’ a roman spa, a sauna, ‘12 lavish en suite bedrooms’, a private cinema, a ‘full- sized’ bar, a hair-salon, a laundry room, a staff apartment, a ‘state- of-theart’ gym and ‘numerous reception rooms’.

Ploughing my way through this lengthy list of costly items, I was reminded of something the witty writer Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘I like to walk down Bond Street thinking of all the things I don’t desire.’

one of the tricks of life is to have sense and money in roughly equal proportions. The moment your money outweighs your sense, you are obliged to get rid of it in increasingly daft ways, a spiral of silliness that, in Michael Flatley’s case, culminates in splashing out £200,000 on a rhino horn for your hunting room.

A second news story concerns the spending of another multimillionaire, an investment banker called edmund Lazarus. Not content with having bought a house for £16 million in the peculiarly desolate millionaire’s enclave of Holland Villas road in West London, Mr Lazarus is planning to burrow 28ft underground to build a ‘ triple decker subterranean complex’. In simple terms, this means that his basement will now have its own basement, which will, in turn, have another basement.

one might have thought it would be much easier just to buy the house next door, which would come with the bonus of windows and fresh air. But this sort of timeconsuming bunker-style development is now a rite of passage for multi-millionaires moving to that area of West London. No sooner have you moved into a big house than you have to spend another £10 million to make it even bigger.

Mr Lazarus’s proposed cave will include a 25- metre swimming pool, an ‘ entertainment room’, a wine cellar, a cigar room, a dance and yoga studio and two-level gymnasium, as well as hot tub and steam rooms.

Just in case he has found time to make any friends, Mr Lazarus is also building a ‘car stacker’ system, which will apparently fit six cars below ground, one on top of the other. ‘Drivers will operate the system using a remote control, which will raise a platform embedded into the house’s drive.’

I know from using my own remote control that it can often take a dozen fruitless jabs and a good few minutes just to switch from BBC1 to BBC2. Wouldn’t it be easier for Mr Lazarus and his friends to park outside, or to call a cab?

But London multimillionaires are not primed to take the easy option. Having worked 18 hours a day for 20 or 30 mirthless years to make all that money, they have lost any memory of how to relax. In their desperate search for happiness, they burrow deeper and deeper underground in pursuit of more and more facilities — cigar rooms, car- stacker systems, dance and yoga studios — that no one could possibly need.

Also this week, we learnt that another multi- millionaire, ‘ Formula 1 mogul eddie Jordan’ has spent £32 million on a 200- tonne, fourdeck luxury cruiser, which includes five bedrooms, a nightclub and a ‘beach club’, whatever that may be.

THe cruiser is so big and heavy that it can only travel at a maximum of 25 mph, or roughly the speed of a disabled scooter. every time Mr Jordan needs to refill the tank, it will cost him £30,000. So when he finally gets to Monte Carlo and discovers that he’s left his passport behind, it could prove very expensive.

There is also a worry that, arriving in the harbour at Monte Carlo, Mr Jordan will find his pride and joy dwarfed by roman Abramovich’s £740 million yacht, appropriately named ‘eclipse’, which not only contains an armour-plated master suite and two helipads, but its own missile defence system.

Happy days! ‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ To which ernest Hemingway facetiously replied, ‘ Yes, they have more money.’ Perhaps he should have added something else. ‘And less fun.’