The start of the week is heralded by more crapola getting into London for work, this time it’s a jam on the M4. I don’t know how people who have to do this every day cope. The only guys who seem immune to it are on two wheels.
I’m supposed to be finishing off air leakage testing at One Hyde Park – the most prestigious residential accommodation in London, or Europe, if the publicity is to be believed. Residents will have a private leisure suite, including pool, gym, spa, racquet courts, cinema and party room at their disposal in the basement. They really won’t have to mix with the great unwashed, for anything, even vehicle access involves using a drive in car lift. It’s the ghetto-isation of the rich.
The news reports double digit growth in sales of luxury products. Ferrari, for example, has sold out of the newest model, at £375k a pop! The majority of customers are from the developing economies, like Brazil and China, and I wonder what their countrymen think of this kind of fortune from the other side of the big divide. The irony is they would probably aspire to the same material goals, given half a chance, as opposed to doing something for the greater good.
The poorer masses are learning what we are in many ways trying to unlearn. They’re gearing up while we attempt to downsize. Everybody wants a car that says something about them, a holiday abroad and a home they can call their own; shopping on Saturdays, lie-in Sundays, a manicure, pedicure, fat-cure, thin-cure, flat screen, iPhone, WiFi, ringtone. Big boobs, wet room, fly drive, high five, credit worthy, plunge pool, lo-cal, theme choon.
When I was younger and more idealistic, I thought that in a world of finite resources it surely follows that when one person has more, another must have correspondingly less? And when those that have less have so very little, like a shack with no power or plumbing, a Ferrari must represent some kind of insult? It seems not. What my dream guitar represents in all this is anybody’s guess – a small fart in somebody's general direction...
Years ago, in a small diving resort in northern Bali, I bought a bottle of local whisky to share with the young Balinese guys managing the cafe. I needed the company, having denied myself the opportunity to join half of Australia on the south coast, and we got slowly drunk as night fell. I tried to convince these guys that I too was a poor man – to give this some context, I was a despatch rider in London living from hand to mouth. I had borrowed some money from my girlfriend to get out there (to visit an old school friend, in Java), so my story carried some weight as far as I was concerned.
They listened politely but were having none of it. Never mind my camera being a crappy instamatic, my rucksack being the one my mum bought me when I was 16 to go to the Reading Festival. Just being there, thousands of miles from home, put me in a different league. It was a pretty miserable trip in the end, because I wanted to travel but hated being a tourist. It was OK while I was with my friend, Mark, but as soon as I went my own way I became a tourist and the mood changed. Something wasn’t right, though, I mean being miserable in paradise? What a knob.
When I get to the end of the jam I can see that there’s no obstruction on the London bound side of the carriageway, the hold-up is due to people slowing down to gawp at a car mashed up on the other side. You’d think people would be sick to realise this, having sat in a jam for the last hour, and make a point of looking away as they swiftly pass by.
Well, get ready for the developing world, we’ve had our fun and it looks like they want their turn. Let us hope they at least have the decency not to gawp at our crashed economy as they pass us by.
