WINE, FITNESS, AND FUR

The Singular Problem of the Very Wealthy

I know 'wealthy' people. Or 'said to be wealthy' people. Some have very grand numbers against their stated value. Some have grand numbers stated for them by Forbes or the various national Business Review Magazines that list this kind of thing.

All the ones I know have big ropes manned by sturdy Lascars tying them to responsibilities or duties or ideologies or merely, to strong delusions. There are those I don't know personally, or at least don't know well personally, but who give me indications that they are different – free from the unwanted detritus of big money. I recall one gentleman who attended the evening harness racing events in the middle of cold wet winter with his pyjamas clearly sneaking out from under his trousers and cardigan. He was certainly one of the wealthiest shrimp and lobster shipping tycoons in South East Asia. Not just 'unaffected,' I think perhaps militantly so, really. Eccentricity – of one sort or another - is very common among the rich.

And for the materially normal among us, the firm ties of responsibilities are only too the same – take the kids to school, wash the car, clothes, dishes, go to work, and on and on. They are still demanding of time and energy and care. We cannot do just whatever we want simply whenever we want! But we could do, with a little extra little thing...

I fancy that all one requires (why am I speaking in the voice of Robert Morley here?!) is an evening spa for genuine adults. Not a day spa. Although day spas are great too, of course.

No, I fancy an evening spa.

There is all this needless dressing up and carrying on that goes with so many things. Let's admit it, we live in a digital screen world, many years up the road from just flopping down in front of the analog television. We can let the Hollywood stars and starlets do all that dressing up and primping for us – especially since they have teams of attendants to help.

The customary attire for my evening spa shall be nothing more complicated than an expensive and luxurious bath robe or dressing gown and slippers. If this kind of thing is good enough for Hugh Hefner it ought to do for the rest of us. One ought to be able to be picked up discreetly by a functional, modern, fully-equipped lounge on wheels – something like the latest Honda Odyssey, which the fairly suave George Clooney recently proffers in advertisements. At a whim or a call from an iPhone or iPad, one ought to be able to call round the vehicle replete with a small hamper of pre-arranged pre-prepared finger food, not too distantly recognizable from the standard and quality of high tea fare at the new Claridge's.

One just might run to a personal masseur on board or at minimum an electronic device that mechanically massages one's feet, or back.

And then one might be restfully and unhurriedly conveyed around the evening streets, to some high vantage point to observe the twinkling city lights, and next on to one's 24-hour Jetts fitness facility to consider the option of a deep night workout... Or a spot in the carpark to read the latest fitness publication or the online Saturday Evening Post via the courtesy wi-fi hotspot.

The truly rich, I think, despair of meaningful intelligent company on fair terms. I wonder myself why cannot company speak with the same deliberate, paced, precision, schooled, practised, designed progression of a Trancelife CD...

But the truly adult, and not the merely rich, just might be able to manage a few arrangements a little closer to what is ideal. Money can buy one a splendid form, or even a decadent form, of solitude. But only knowledge of the world and crafted maturity can supply one with a splendidly decadent form of company. The secret lies in two words: beautiful and wise. The Beautiful Wise. Wisdom has a touch of decadence about it, since it always comes after mere experience, and perhaps after experience alone has already begun its fall into decay. And the beautiful, is not really beautiful at all, unless it is also wise.

It was wise several years ago to purchase gold. It is beautifully wise today to have done so. But to paraphrase the great Warren Buffett: it looked wise, and it was wise, but it might have been even wiser still than it looked. There is a long, long way yet to go for the price of gold. A very long way.

The Generations Of Genius

Great intellects turn up regularly but not constantly or continuously – there is usually a gap of many years between a sort of tide of bright people. Pure intellect is not like art or music, which you might even say is taken to a peak through unwitting inspiration. Whereas the exercise of pure intellect is mostly a matter of just plain hard work. How many people, for example, were convinced because of poor teachers, that they weren't good at maths, or literature, or history...? How many successful mathematicians, scientists, historians, writers will tell you, by the same token, that what got them there, was dumb persistence!

My private theory is that it isn't about genetics or generation-skipping, but about the tendency of the power-driven to exploit the work of great intellects, and commandeer the apex, as it were, and hold back competition.

Thus you will get one generation that is able to avoid the scrutiny of the power-mad at the top who are moving into the decline of advancing years, and thereby re-express the work of genuine active intellect.

Right now I am in the middle of reading a book I missed reading earlier while I had consumed just about everything else of his – Asimov's 'Prelude To Foundation,' a rather large book which pre-sees all this current 'global warming/climate change' stuff. Asimov the scientist and thinker is transparently the author's voice behind each of his stories – he's a very clunky writer whose hand, if not exactly heavy, is quite evident. But of course he's still very readable. His intellectual height comes from his grasp of the importance of science, and his ideas – philosophical and even I would say political – rather than merely his slickness with words. The next identity I'd like to say a few words about is Len Deighton.And here we have a great intellect unhampered by the vast difficulties of specialised and often extreme science. Here we have an intellect - whose actual spoken voice is a cockney one – who can speak in ways so cleverly that out of the frisson of his mental games, we are left only that much later having to acknowledge how towering an intellect he really is.

I find Deighton a dangerous personality. He is utterly self-effacing to the interviewing camera but this belies his obvious self-comprehension about what the public can, and cannot, take, from the genius.

Still, Deighton is from the last great intelligent generation. We have not yet seen what the new crop has to show us; what it has to thrill us with and titillate us about and open our eyes to.

Will it come? Is it really going to come? We've been fed such utter drivel by people like Murdoch and Reagan and Thatcher and that crowd for over more than thirty years now.

Oh yes, it is coming. As surely as those old fools are dying. Nothing surer. You can smell genius. It's like getting into a brand new Rolls Royce – it's like opening a box of brand new leather shoes inside a church basement...

All the Best,

Calvin J. Bear