Here’s an oxymoron: green private jets

This year’s must-have Christmas present is a small rectangle of plastic, the size of a credit card. It costs E129,000, or a little short of £100,000 at current rates of exchange. Well, actually, it was last year’s must-have for those who consider themselves really up with the zeitgeist, but a NetJets card is still a pretty cool accessory to flash around and impress your friends.

It says you can whizz around the globe at short notice in one of the company’s fleet of small planes; the E129,000 ‘entry level’ card, a sort of base-metal Barclaycard, buys you 25 flying hours, enough to flip across the Atlantic and back, and have something left over to take her to Paris. For those who consider the card just too last-year, then $400,000 buys you a one sixteenth share in a NetJets Gulfstream, so you really can take off anywhere in the world, bypassing the horrors of the airport check-in and all those ghastly people in the queue.