The rich and their money are easily parted . ..
FROM GOLD LACE TO GOLDFISH, THERE’S A LAVISH HISTORY OF SPLASHING THE CASH
They may be all very well in the right place at the right time, but which of us would want to wake every morning to the headachey drone of bagpipes?
On Tuesday morning, Pipe Major Paul Burns, who played so beautifully at the late Queen’s funeral, woke our new King with 15 minutes of bagpipe music as he marched around the gardens at Clarence house.
Like so many of the luxuries of the well-to-do, the ownership of a personal bagpiper was originally prompted by the need to keep up with the Joneses.
Back in 1842, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were staying at Taymouth Castle with the Marquess of Breadalbane. envious of the Marquess’s personal piper, Queen Victoria was determined to get one for herself.
Queen elizabeth II gamely kept this tradition going: her Majesty’s piper played beneath her bedroom window for 15 minutes each morning.
As status symbols go, it takes some beating. But, like so many of the acquisitions of the welltodo, the beneficiary must have had to remind herself from time to time that bagpipes at dawn was not a punishment but a reward.
The wealthy have always struggled to think of new ways to spend their money. In the 16th century, when lace was at a premium, King henry III of France appeared at court wearing 4,000 yards — more than two miles — of pure gold lace.
Marguerite de Valois, the wife of his successor, wore a lace collar so wide that, presented with soup, she required a 2 ft-long spoon.
We may chuckle at these historical excesses, but many of our own luxuries will, in the course of time, seem much closer to burdens.
For instance, I’ve noticed that luxury hotels now compete over how many cushions they can place on top of their guests’ beds.
Staying in a boutique hotel in east Sussex the other day, I had to remove 11 cushions before I could get into the bed. So why do they do it?
As reported in yesterday’s Mail, the mobile phone billionaire John Caudwell ‘ boasts’ a house in Mayfair that is twice the size of the Royal Albert hall.
Guests wishing to enter its dining room — the second-largest after Buckingham Palace — are obliged to use stepping stones to cross an indoor stream teeming with tropical fish.
In poorer areas, fish swimming through a house would attract a visit from social services, but the rich are different.
It’s now seemingly de rigueur for all billionaires, however large their homes, to burrow downwards to install ‘ health spas’, private cinemas, nightclubs, car parks and swimming pools.
They then reach for their Saddam hussein home Decoration Manual, and give them marble floors, chandeliers the size of delivery vans and lots of silver and gold.
Caudwell’s gloomy underground swimming pool has a dimpled mirror ceiling and walls of bright red and grey, like the aftermath of a shark attack.
Needless to say, he also owns a home in Monaco, plus a 73-metre superyacht called, rather ominously, ‘Titania’.
Why do billionaires love yachts? ‘It’s actually not very comfortable on a yacht . . . it feels like you’re in a small
house, and the house is slipping around under your feet’ , says the author William Leith, who has investigated this weird phenomenon. It is, he concludes, because the wealthy are addicted to spending money, and are attracted to anything, no matter how daft, that gives them a reason to spend more.
AND the same goes for so many items coveted by the rich. As Frank Skinner once pointed out, oysters taste like ‘sucking phlegm off the shell of a tortoise’.
In Victorian times, oysters were so cheap and plentiful that prisoners begged to be given something else. But now that they are expensive, the rich crave them.
Private jets and helicopters, guard dogs, ugly artworks by Tracey emin and Damien hirst, £10,000 handbags, hideous designer dresses: most of the rewards of the very wealthy would, in a saner world, be regarded as punishments.
Recently, I heard of a ferociously wealthy West Coast American, the owner of a fleet of private jets, who said to a friend: ‘Did you know you can buy your own private aircraft carrier?’