Making Demands

A few days ago Noi and I were watching a programme she was interested in on the Travel and Discovery Channel (at least I think that's what it's called. I can't keep up with all these channels, there are so many.) The programme was about the holiday homes of the super rich, or something along those lines. They seem to do a lot of stuff like that, letting viewers stare in at the lifestyles of the ultra-privileged. In fact the ultra-privileged don't have anything as mundane as lives - they have these mysterious lifestyles.

Anyway, to try and get to the point, I was finding it all quite interesting to watch, just to see the remarkable houses that people actually own and vicariously enjoy them, and noticing that I couldn't honestly say I was envious - which I sort of suspected was how the makers of the programme expected me to feel. There was nothing especially saintly about my lack of envy. Basically buying one of these places looked awfully troublesome and they struck me as major headaches to look after, even if you could pay someone else to suffer the headache on your behalf.

Confirming my suspicions, a chap who functioned as a kind of estate agent for the super-duper rich, and who seemed quite a pleasant fellow in his way, started to talk of how extraordinarily demanding the folk who buy these kind of places are, a fact that somehow didn't come as a surprise to me. I was fascinated by his rationalisation of this. Essentially he put it down to the fact that these people were special and had made their money because of the demands they were prepared to make, so it was only right, to be expected, that they continued to make such demands. He almost seemed to be saying that he respected them even more for doing so.

The odd thing was that I'm fairly sure he was well aware of the fact that the obvious equivalent to those who feel that they are significant enough to demand precisely whatever they need and feel intense annoyance when it isn't very quickly delivered are infants of around two to three years of age. I had that odd sense of seeing the emperor minus clothing - an image that seems to be extraordinarily potent in its application to much of our modern 'lifestyle'.

Tentatively wise statement for today: when you think you are entitled to something you are usually not at your best.