Fantasy

Okay, how about a bit of fantasizing? If I were a dollar multi-billionaire, with at least five billion in guaranteed securities which would allow me to spend a million dollars a day indefinitely (let’s say that means for the next fifteen years) what would I do?

To start with, I would ensure that my daughter would never have to work except at what she truly loves.

I would entirely renovate and refurbish my present little house to my taste. That would include getting the street re-layered, and planting large, leafy flowering trees all alongside.

Next, I would buy a villa in the south of France, maybe, and penthouses in London, Paris and the bay area of San Francisco, along with one giant rural estate somewhere in the US where I could luxuriate in peace and solitude over at least a thousand hectares of virgin forest with a lake or a river nearby, and snow for at least four months a year. Every one of these would come with a proper butler of Jeeves vintage, if such men are available.

I would travel the world in first class comfort, slumming it only when my whimsy dictated me, and of course with armed security guards in top of the line SUVs in tow.

I’d have a lot of dogs, all-year swimming pools to myself, and a very nice wine cellar.

I’d have a small dedicated staff administering my charitable activities, which would amount to $ 80-100 million a year, aimed at only causes that I genuinely believe can make a significant difference for the better to this world. Education, as I have understood it, for those who I think truly deserve it and will make the best possible use of it, will be very high on my list. Especially being of some serious help to my most favourite and promising old boys.

I’d hire the best teachers to train me in subjects as diverse as Sanskrit and tai chi.

I have no interest in boys’ toys which are the favourite of low-class philistines who want to preen before people of their own mental calibre, but I might buy a little biplane if I can learn to fly it at this age, and a large sailboat with a crew of three or four to take me across the vast oceans now and then, with only salt air and sunshine and silence around me.

I shall find out whether there are comfort women available who also have brains, and who can perhaps be induced to become something like friends, if only for a price. Call me a cynical romantic if you like, incurable if you like, but that’s the way I am.

Above all, I shall meet and talk only to people whom I genuinely like, invariably one on one or in small groups. I shall most definitely neither attend parties nor throw any.

I shall make sure that I can have euthanasia whenever I choose to, and no questions asked.

[I wrote this thing because all my life I have been disgustedly watching and listening to middle-class people slobbering over the ‘lifestyles of the rich and famous’, and thought drawing up my own little wish list would not be a bad idea. This post could be read in tandem with ‘What sort of person am I?’, the link to which is a fixture on top of this blog]