Afriend of mine announces on Facebook that the other day the cashier at the bank shoved over a slip of paper that indicated he was £96,900 in credit. “Just for a few seconds I had a glimpse into what it must be like to have £96,900 in your current account. Unequivocally marvellous sums it up. The purest ecstasy,” he wrote. I wonder.
Naturally the mistake was rectified very quickly and the true figure, he went on to tell us, was exactly £100,000 less than that, so I can see why his heart might have leapt, but casual acquaintance with the wealthy has taught me that the they are never satisfied with the amount they have and every so often some wizened creep like Bernie Ecclestone will let slip in an interview that all this money-gathering is simply a joyless exercise in ringing up some other plutocrat and saying “as of today, I now have more money than you”, thus making said plutocrat choke on his platinum-plated cornflakes and try to reverse the situation by immiserating a further tranche of the world’s population.
This is how it works and we’ve known it since Basil of Caesarea in the 4th century AD said: “If each one would take that which is sufficient for his needs, leaving what is superfluous to those in distress, no one would be rich, no one poor . . . The rich man is a thief.”
This is not invariably the case. The other day I was at a sweltering barbecue lunch where one of the guests informed me that he was doing a little bit of wealth creation of his own: he was not only having his own children educated privately but also lining the pockets of an estate agent by buying – “for a song” – a four-bedroom ex-council property so that said children could, when they reached their estate, have somewhere to live. The song he mentioned had a chorus which went “four hundred thousand pounds”, which sounds like rather a lot to me. I mean not even an imaginary £96,900 is going to cover that.
The interesting thing about this information is that it was conveyed to me in terms that strongly suggested I was meant to applaud. As the man does not know me very well, he is not expected to know that I wear an invisible T-shirt whose slogans, which are visible in the right light, say “I loathe the rich” and “abolish private education now”, but surely the gathering scowl on my face should have tipped him off.
I wandered off morosely and thought about my own children’s future. The eldest has recently finished her A-levels and is awaiting the results. Being far cleverer than I was at her age, she should be a shoo-in for any university she chooses, but Cambridge have already said “no way”, which strikes me as a bit silly of them, for they let me in for some reason.
Now I come to think of it, it may have been the strong suspicion that my daughter is related to me that may have put them off in the first place. The dog may return to his vomit as the fool to his folly, but Cambridge U isn’t that foolish. There also seems to be a regression to earlier times – by which I mean the 1930s – going on in the higher education system, so that the privately-educated continue to stuff the top universities. Well, maybe there’ll be a world war in a decade, and 20 years after that a social revolution comparable to the 1960s, but by then I’ll be 80 and, even if alive, in no real position to enjoy it.
The only thing that seems to be getting better is the cricket. For six years now I have been unable to watch it on the telly and so have had to resort to listening to it on the radio. This is no hardship and the tension towards the end of the first Ashes Test still managed to communicate itself over Radio 4 Long Wave quite effectively. As the Australians inched towards what had once seemed like an impossible fourth-innings target I found myself feeling sicker and weaker and more comprehensively frazzled. There are still some people out there who think Test cricket is a dull affair but they know not whereof they speak.
I, and anyone else who was listening, was a nervous wreck by the end and I have still not recovered the full use of my legs. It also means that, what with the nice weather we’re having, it looks as though we’re going to have a real summer. I have just voted in the Guardian’s “is it too hot?” poll and am delighted to say that so far the “no” vote is almost twice the “yes” vote. The only problem with the sunshine is it brings the insufferably wealthy out, like wasps.
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