Paul Horrell and Supercars
I’m talking here about the level of wealth marked by multiple mansions, say, and/or a private jet. How can that possibly be the route to happiness? I recently had lunch in someone’s mansion.
It’s the size of a stately home, and had indeed been part of our nation’s heritage industry, but now a super-rich couple has bought and made a house of it. Lovely it is too, decorated with taste and individual style, and humanised by family photos hanging in the toilet. But I could never live there.
Every time I leave home, I have to run about the place – where are the car keys, what did I do with my mobile? Most days I come down from my office (actually the spare bedroom) to the kitchen and realise I’ve left something up there. Imagine if they were hundreds of feet apart down long stately corridors. Imagine there were 19 rooms in which to leave the mobile.
Imagine now having four mansions across three continents. My whole life would be eroded by scrabbling about for my personal effects. It’d make me feel a mug and erode my self-esteem. But not as much as my self-esteem would be eroded by the people who do their business with the super-rich. Their sole sales technique seems to be to grease up to the potential client and tell him how blessed he is with near-supernatural taste and discernment.
Just try and read one of those brandbuilding magazines the posh car companies send out to their potential owners. It’ll be written in this terrible oleaginous tone, going on about what a nose the readers have for the finer things in life, how distinguished they are in every respect.
No they aren’t. The rich are distinguished in one respect only: they have lots of money. Some of them have taste and discernment, but others have none whatever. Were I wealthy and every contact I had with anyone trying to do business with me was on the basis of this nauseating falsehood, I’d gradually start to wonder if anyone was ever talking to me straight. What misery.
Unless you give it away, being rich obliges you to spend money more or less non-stop. It must be exhausting. A friend of mine, not in the private-jet category but certainly prosperous beyond my imagining, expends inordinate brain-time deciding what to buy next. He goes on for hours about where it would be nice to own a house. This doesn’t cheer him up, because he’s always scared of getting it wrong. Last time he settled on a place to buy, it didn’t suit him, and he sold it within months, a chastened man. The tyranny of choice is the corrosive fear of buying badly.
Luckily, I can suggest a means for someone burdened by an excessive mountain of money to reduce its altitude without over-complicating their life. Buy some cars. For the rich, the great thing about cars is that they’re almost useless, and so there’s no need to worry about buying badly, because it’s impossible to buy well.
Look at the Bugatti Veyron, a car whose staggering performance is as accessible as breathing. What could be better for flitting off to the Riviera? Well, viewed from the perspective of someone with modest means, almost anything could be better, because the Veyron has no luggage space.
Carry a passport for crossing borders and a platinum credit card for the fuel and that’s your lot. But to the super-wealthy, this limitation only adds to its appeal. It means they can spend even more money without having to think about it. They must employ someone – at considerable cost – to forward their underpants to their destination. Or maybe to go on ahead and buy an entirely new set of duds.
For similar reasons, the Bentley Continental is a much better car – less interesting, but better – than the top-end Brooklands. It has to be, because it’s cheaper, and so the people who buy it, who are only moderately wealthy and have to rub along with just a couple of cars, will want some practical use out of it. The fact that the twice-as-expensive Brooklands has so many more limitations is perfect for the super-rich, because it goads them into buying something else as well, just to patch over its deficiencies.
Expensive classics are even better. They aren’t only useless when they’re working, they’re usually broken down. This presents a whole world of expenditure to their owners, who will soon see their wealth drained by the need to get new castings made, gears machined, hand-beaten panels flown in from the other side of the world. They’ll soon have that mountain of money removed from them. And happiness will at last be theirs.
Source: TopGear